Biophilia Recordings
Gloria ChengRoot Progressions2025
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Acclaimed for performances of “commanding technique, color, and imagination” (The New York Times), GRAMMY- and Emmy-winning concert pianist Gloria Cheng is a leading proponent of the music of our time. For Root Progressions, she has commissioned six master improvisers – Anthony Davis, Jon Jang, James Newton, Arturo O’Farrill, Linda May Han Oh, and Gernot Wolfgang – to compose fully-notated solo works for her. Says Gloria, “My interest was to experience what they might choose to express in a fixed, contemporary classical medium.” The resulting pieces are as diverse and compelling as the artists who created them.

Anthony Davis’s Piano Heaven suite touches on historical styles from Duke to Monk, culminating in an arresting tribute to Cecil Taylor. Taking a traditional Chinese folk tune as its point of departure, Jon Jang’s evocative Ancestors & Sisters is dedicated to four Chinese-American “women warriors,” including Gloria herself. Arturo O’Farrill’s colorful Mis Guerreros references Orishas, Yoruban deities who provide protection in the spiritual realm. Its propulsive third section is based on bata rhythms found in Yoruban worship rites.

James Newton contributes a tender and expansive tribute to his wife Jo Ann in Eight Calla Lilies, describing the idiom as “a 21st-century approach to impressionism.” The title of Gernot Wolfgang’s mercurial Two Movements refers not only to the work’s form, but distinct types of motion: “Pendulum” and “Shift.”

Root Progressions closes with Linda May Han Oh’s captivating Littoral Tales, which conjures the ocean’s power and allure in a pair of contrasting movements, “High Tide” and “Low Tide.”