A New Spin on the Classics and Sound Healing

New York, NY, July 05, 2011 --(PR.com)-- Earlier this year, January 2011, Musical Concepts released Meditate With The Masters, the new solo CD by by composer-pianist, and ComposersCollaborative Inc. Co-Founder and Artistic Director, Jed Distler. Each of the 15 tracks will sound familiar and yet different as each is inspired by a classical composer whose well-known composition is rearranged and reworked by Distler into a newly minted piano piece designed for relaxation, healing, simple listening pleasure and to calm the mind and spirit. The masters include Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Schumann, Pachelbel, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Wagner, Mussorgsky, Satie, and Jed Distler.

“I’ve always had the gift and the curse of being able to improvise in many styles, and one day, I impulsively took the Ode to Joy theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, gave it a ‘New Age’ spin, and was pleasantly surprised. I then tried the same treatment upon other famous themes from the classical repertoire, with variable success, yet I kept at these little improvisations, and before I knew it, a project was born,” says Distler.

The project started in 2006 about a year after Distler’s wife and ComposersCollaborative Inc. Co-Founder and Producing Director, Celia Cooke, was diagnosed with breast cancer, with all of the recordings taking place over four days in April, 2010, a little less than a year before she died. Distler draws on his youthful jazz and pop background and appreciation and understanding of ambient music, along with his celebrated classical technique and subtle range of color and nuance to bring together a wide array of familiar themes from the core classical repertoire and create easily accessible, easy to listen to music with broad audience appeal for relaxation, meditation, and healing. The cover art is a photograph taken by his wife. Meditate With The Masters presents a western-based alternative in the sound healing market which is currently predominately eastern-based.

CD lists at $17.99. Sold at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, J&R Music & Computer World, BlowItOutaHere, Arkiv Music, and Target, among other places. Downloads available.

About The Artist:
If you're familiar with Jed Distler as one of the most engaging music writers and radio hosts in the United States, you might be surprised to learn he is also "an altogether extraordinary pianist" (Newark Star-Ledger) and New York's “Downtown keyboard magus" (The New Yorker). He has premiered works by Frederic Rzewski, Lois V. Vierk, Virko Baley, Wendy Mae Chambers, Andrew Thomas, Simeon ten Holt, Virgil Thomson, David Maslanka, William Schimmel, Kitty Brazelton, Alvin Curran, and Eleanor Hovda -- many which were written especially for him. In addition to recent commissions from Jenny Lin, IonSound, and Song in Music, his works have been recorded by Margaret Leng Tan, Guy Livingston, and Quattro Mani, among other New Music luminaries, And no summer would be complete without WNYC’s ritual broadcast of Jed’s String Quartet No. 1 (the Mister Softee Variations). Distler is a Yamaha artist.

About The Label:
Musical Concepts aims to bring to the public exceptional value with a select line of high-quality classical repertoire carefully chosen from the vast array of first class recordings in existence. In addition to reissuing urgently worthy titles, Musical Concepts is also engaged in producing new repertoire with a new dimension.

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