From the first rich chord:

How is it that beauty flourishes in the midst of all these troubles, all these worries of everyday life? How can one kind thought grow in a barren and wasted landscape? This is a mystery, and something to dwell on.

The chords continue, form a line, and then a pattern, an atmosphere, a certain scent in the air, a special kind of nourishment to thrive on, right in that lonely spot in the middle of these vast spaces, where everywhere is here, and all times now.

These short, almost pointillistic piano pieces by Ernesto Diaz-Infante really slow you down; hey, hey, hold on there! Take it easy, no one is going to remember or care in a hundred years: “It’s never to late to do nothing at all!” (Allen Ginsberg).

If the pieces on Diaz-Infante’s “itz’at” are haikus from a misty Japanese landscape, then these moments out the “Ucross Journals” are silvery aphorisms out of an old-timer’s far-eyed plains of Wyoming, etched on leaves of grass by the early winter frost. So delicate is the touch that it fondles the keys of the piano, which floats in the sounding space in front of you as you play this CD in your room.

I see that some of the pieces are characterized as “feldmanesque” by the composer and pianist, and that certainly is the case here. I’m glad that Morton Feldman really did give younger composers and musicians the incentive to create music in this fashion, not measuring time, but giving ample room for time, making time obsolete, unimportant. Nobody watches their watches in these sonic surroundings. We’re in Wyoming in this music, but we could as well be in a Japanese rock garden with raked sand and rocks that sit completely still – and of course it all comes down to a state of mind.

Diaz-Infante composed these structures - or structured these compositions - while in residency at the Ucross Foundation in Ucross, Wyoming. He says that pitch and harmonics were used as spring-boards for improvisations inspired by the wide-open, spacious Wyoming landscape – and anybody who has traveled those expanses knows what he means, and that those open skies reduce your thoughts to essentials: who am I?, why am I?, what is life?, is there a purpose? – and so forth.

I am really sorry to note that something evidently went wrong in the printing process of this CD. Hopefully it doesn’t affect all the CDs that were printed, but here and there a loud click is heard from the CD (through the loudspeakers), and since nothing can be detected on the surface, this usually indicates a faulty printing process. The fault could as well be inherited from the source tape, which I suppose is a DAT tape. That has happened before, though not often. I encountered it once on one of the CDs in a box from Olympia Records with Tatiana Nikolayeva’s rendering of J. S. Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. I talked to the producer of the CDs, and he told me that the sharp noise was inherent in the Russian digital source tape. It is particularly grave to encounter these noises in a music that is so peaceful, so intensely concentrated and so meditatively focussed as the Ucross Journal. Hopefully there will be another printing later.

Ernesto Diaz-Infante has structured the pieces on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis. I suppose his residency lasted four weeks, for he has composed – or improvised – a piece for each day of those weeks, even though week one starts on a Tuesday, and the last week ends with the piece for the Friday of that week. The composer even gives the time of day for the pieces, like “Su 4/5 10:43 am; Sunday afternoon showers / rhythmically detached / feldmanesque”.

I really love this; I really want to underline that. This is so beautiful, so softly intense…