Burton Greene

A singular, radical entry in the Nimbus West catalogue from one of the true pioneers of the free jazz piano. Burton Greene was there at the very beginning - co-founding the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble with bassist Alan Silva in early-60s New York, recording for ESP-Disk and Columbia, playing the legendary loft sessions at Slugs'. After relocating to Amsterdam in 1969, Greene spent decades exploring the intersections of free jazz, Indian music, klezmer and electronic composition. Solo Orchestra In Real Time, recorded at STEIM Studios in Amsterdam in 1989 with a grant from the Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst, represents perhaps his most ambitious experiment: an entire orchestral universe conjured from a Roland D50 synthesizer and U110 module.

 Three extended compositions - dedicated respectively to Bob Graettinger, Béla Bartók and Charles Ives - build dense, aleatoric, polyphonic landscapes where detuned orchestral voices pile up in canon, stretto and fugal combinations. Greene himself described the process as "an extension of my earlier experiments inside the piano, but more interesting and complex" - with aftertouch functions generating between 32 and 64 simultaneous voices from a single chord. Nearly an hour of solo electronic music that bridges the world of free improvisation with the compositional ambitions of the 20th-century avant-garde. A visionary and deeply uncompromising work, unlike anything else in the Nimbus West universe.