Josh Modney - Engage (2018)

Violinist Josh Modney presents this release highlighting his remarkable versatility as a performer, collaborator, and improviser. The album is elegantly cohesive across the entire program, as concerns with alternate intonation systems, experimental approaches to timbre, and intensely collaborative work connect the pieces. Moreover, tying the collection together, from Braxton to Bach to Modney's own powerful improvisations, is Modney's focused virtuosity and a laserlike attention to sound and the details of the means for producing and shaping that sound. One hears this immediately in the first bars of the opening work by longtime Wet Ink Ensemble colleague, Sam Pluta. We hear not just a generic violin scraping sound along the string, instead we hear a whole vocabulary opening up inside this technique of sound production, a language Modney manipulates with as much subtlety of expression as we hear in his just-intoned performance of Bach's timeless 'Ciaconna'. Josh Modney's improvisations demonstrate the sophisticated vocabulary he has developed for his work in this context. In his own words, ''This way of working with material--allowing rigorous investigations into sound to be the spark that illuminates a deeper path toward form, expression, emotion, language-represents an ethos that permeates all of the works on the album.''