Album Notes

One winter a few years ago I got a case of pneumonia.

In the early weeks of recovery my sole comfort was to noodle at the piano for short stretches. A few minutes of improvisation, then back to bed. I recorded these pieces on a pocket voice recorder, and later transcribed the ones that caught my fancy. I added them to a folio of instrumental pieces that I meant to record someday, and put them on a shelf.

Then last autumn the folio tugged at me for attention. I began playing through it, and liked many of the pieces. It got me in a mood, and I wrote a few more pieces. I began to rehearse them on my grandmother’s old 1927 Knabe, the piano I’ve composed nearly all my music on. It’s a good friend. But these pieces needed to be recorded on a better piano.

With the help of many people (including a local private studio that allowed me to practice for weeks on their gorgeous Steingraeber), I found the piano for this recording. The minute I sat down on the scoring stage at Skywalker Sound and played their Yamaha concert grand I was in love. The piano, the hall, the total environment was a dream come true. The spirit of the sessions blossomed further when Irene Sazer joined us with her violin. We recorded 18 pieces over the course of 2 days. Much of what you hear are single takes, unedited.

While I hope I never get pneumonia again, the ethereal state it put me in stripped my music down to simple essences, and let me see beauty where before I might have rushed by it.
I’m thankful for that.

Grammy-nominated composer Gunnar Madsen is also an accomplished singer, writer, filmmaker and actor. He is well known as the co-founder and songwriter/performer with the legendary acapella group The Bobs. His solo efforts have yielded critically acclaimed albums across dramatically different genres. He has received commissions from Lincoln Center, the Los Angeles Theater Center, the Minnesota Opera, Oberlin Dance Collective, ISO Dance Theater, National Public Radio and many others. He is a featured performer on the soundtrack of "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," in the National Geographic Special "Asteroids: Deadly Impact," and is the emotionally charged voice of Sammy Davis, Jr. in the Emmy-award winning HBO film, "The Rat Pack." He arranged music for and appears in the Jennifer Aniston/Vince Vaughn hit "The Break-up", and the music from his Spinning World CD has been featured in many episodes of "Sex and the City" and in the Marisa Tomei film "Just a Kiss."

Gunnar's stage musical based on the outsider group The Shaggs (with collaborator Joy Gregory) has been produced in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York to thunderous critical and popular acclaim. It set new box office records and won Best Original Score from Entertainment Today (beating out Mel Brooks' The Producers), and won 6 Garland Awards, 3 LA Drama Critic's Circle Awards and 4 LA weekly awards, including Musical of the Year and Best Score. The NY Times called it: "unsettling, disturbing, challenging, even a little awe-inspiring."

Gunnar's family CDs (Old Mr. Mackle Hackle, Ants in My Pants! and I'm Growing) have received multiple prestigious national awards, including Parents' Choice Gold Award, Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold, NAPPA Gold, Scholastic Teacher's Pick Award, and the CMW Best Recording for Older Children award. His storybook adaptation of his song Old Mr. Mackle Hackle is available from Little, Brown.

In 2000, Gunnar journeyed to Russia to film a documentary on a remarkable farming community for disabled people. The film, Svetlana Village: The Camphill Experience in Russia, was an official selection of the Ojai International Film Festival.