Jocelyn Pook: 3 CDs (1999-2007)

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Jocelyn Pook: 3 CDs (1999-2007)

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Jocelyn Pook’s distinctive style is a product of her diverse experiences in classical, commercial, and so-called world music. After graduating from London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she performed with many pop artists including The Communards and Massive Attack, and formed Electra Strings for whom she wrote original material. She has worked extensively with eminent dance companies such as DV8 and Shobana Jeyasingh, and in 2002 she was commissioned by the BBC Proms to write a work for The King’s Singers in collaboration with Poet Laureate Andrew Motion.
As one of the Leytonstone Contingent, Pook recorded on two occasions with pianist Jeremy Peyton Jones for Rough Trade and later for Century XXI. About a year later, she joined Anne Stephenson and Audrey Riley to accompany Virginia Astley both on stage and record. Session work followed and alternated with her co-founding of the Electra Strings with Australian violinist Sonia Slany and an album on the Village Life label. This neoclassical chamber quartet later transformed into the Brilliant Strings after she and Slany had gone their separate ways.

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Jocelyn Pook: 3 CDs (1999-2007)

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Jocelyn Pook: 3 CDs (1999-2007)

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Jocelyn Pook's Flood features the composer/pianist's diverse approach to her craft, ranging from medievally-inspired pieces to more modern-sounding works. Two of the pieces on Flood, which was released in 1997 in the U.K. as Deluge, were used in Stanley Kubrick's final film Eyes Wide Shut: "Migrations" and "Masked Ball," (the latter was featured in the movie's controversial private party sequence). Tracks like "Oppenheimer" and "Goya's Nightmare" have a similarly brooding, mysterious tone, while works like "Romeo and Juliet" and "Thousand Year Dream" have a softer, more romantic feel. Alternately soothing and engaging, Flood demonstrates why Pook is a popular classical/new age artist in the U.K..

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Jocelyn Pook: 3 CDs (1999-2007)

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If you remember the stark, bare-bones score to Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, then you've heard Jocelyn Pook. A British composer with edgy, avant-garde sensibilities, she nevertheless lures you into her world of sound like a Venus flytrap: pretty on the outside, dangerous once you get in. "Dionysus," the opening track on Untold Things, is a haunting Gothic-style hymn sung by Melanie Pappenheim over minor-key string cycles. On "Red Song," Russian and Tatar vocal samples mix with Verdi's "Te Deum" to create a global choral lament. "Upon This Rock" sets a Middle Eastern ululating vocal sample against a decidedly English chorale and heroic strings. On "Yellow Fever Psalm," Pappenheim's vocal is played backwards in perfect harmony against a droning string arrangement. Pook terrain is one of thwarted expectations and musical puzzle-making whose songs seduce you with their minor-key melancholy. She often works in contrasts and she's particularly enamored of mixing Middle Eastern instruments and voices in western classical settings, building her orchestrations around the melodies of vocal samples, rather than the usual ambient technique of plopping a sample into the middle of an instrumental mix. Untold Things is a challenging album with untold charms that reveal themselves on repeated listening. –John Diliberto

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Jocelyn Pook: 3 CDs (1999-2007)

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Jocelyn Pook is not the most familiar name in film music, yet slowly she is establishing an enviable reputation as a composer well able to meet the demands of any film genre. With her score to "Brick Lane" Pook has declared a commitment to authenticity, which far exceeds the usual Hollywood standards. The film is based upon the best selling novel of Monica Ali, and tells the story of a Bangladeshi woman Nazneem, who at a young age leaves her family behind to enter an arranged marriage with an older man. The film contrasts the new life of Nazneem in East London with flashbacks to the life she left behind with her sister in Bangladesh. The main part of the plot picks up the story several years later when Nazneem, now with a teenage family, begins a relationship which leads to a re-examination of many personal and cultural questions. Fittingly Pook's music is very much a fusion of Eastern and Western styles. While no-one at mfiles is an expert on Bangladeshi musical culture, significant parts of the film's music, instrumentation and vocal delivery sound very convincing indeed, adding considerably to the viewer's experience.