NJ native Grateful Dead pianist Tom Constanten plays on with Dose Hermanos
Alex Biese for app.
Asbury Park Press
Published Dec. 6,2022
The musical adventure of Tom Constanten continues.
A Rock and Roll Hall of Famer thanks to his time at the piano for the Grateful Dead, the Jersey Shore native is back with “Persistence of Memory,” his new album with fellow Dead organization alum Bob Bralove under their Dose Hermanos banner.
“Persistence of Memory,” available now on CD and streaming, is a mystifying meeting of the musical minds, a series of sonic sojourns to fantastic frontiers.
“I’ve described us as coherent but not congruent,” Constanten said of his work with Bralove. “We each bring something different to the table — he with his electronic wizardry … and composition studies and I with my composition studies in Europe 60 years ago with (Karlheinz) Stockhuasen and (Luciano) Berio and (Pierre) Boulez. … Putting this together, we have all these sorts of musical discussions. Sometimes, even while we’re doing them, they sound like arguments.”
Within the realm of “Persistence,” those arguments can resolve into the sublime — “Bubbles” is an enveloping pool of acoustic piano and electronic textures that invites the listener ever-deeper — or into something sharper, such as the grandly menacing and bewitching “Garden of Delights,” a 7½ minute odyssey of the mind.
On “Garden,” Constanten explained, “I was being a downtown New York composer, like Morton Feldman or John Cage, and Bob was like a Midtown composer like Samuel Barber or William Schuman. … It was as if Mortin Feldman and Samuel Barber met for lunch on 57th Street.”
So it goes on “Persistence of Memory,” a work that recalls everyone from Cage to, on “Cirque Des Etioles,” the digital-jazz-from-space work of “Twin Peaks” composer Angelo Badalamenti.
“It’s a multi-stylistic exploration, for sure, and that’s what we do, because both of us have intimate connections with a lot of different musical styles,” said Constanten. “And again, they’re overlapping, but he’ll come up with stuff that’s totally alien to me and I can be counted on to be alien sometimes.”
