Jack Gabel

Jack Gabel, (b. 1949 -) presently lives in Portland, Oregon. He has traveled extensively, throughout Europe, Africa and Asia and worked many summers as a commercial fisherman in Alaska.

Jack Gabel has written numerous concert hall works for many different combinations of instruments and voices, with and without electroacoustic accompaniments and/or enhancements. He also creates mixed-media works alone and with collaborators, using musique concrete and poetry, frequently his own, some of which has been published apart from its use in contemporary performance pieces and more traditional settings for singers.

Though classically trained with composers Derek Healey, Tomas Svoboda and poet Ralph Salisbury, Gabel recounts as his most memorable musical experience, the impromptu jam session he had with an Afghan tribesman in a Herat tea house in 1972 -- the composer on mouth organ and the local talent holding forth on his handmade, rough-hewn, 3-string lute. The two miraculously found a common modality straight away and carried on for several hours. "No concert-hall premiere or recording session can to date compare," adds the composer, "nor likely ever will."

Today, Gabel's work is infused with widely varied ethnic and ancient colors and motives, most notably those of the ancient, native cultures of North America.

His 1997 article on electronic music for the All Music Guide can be found at Bob's Music Index.

Reviews

"The CD release event at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center Portland, April 10-11-12-13, 2003 was "Lyricism Electrified"
-- David Stabler (The Oregonian)

"Twenty years of electroacoustics slips into the mix for this, Jack Gabel's 2nd solo release. From the elegant opening Somewhere Suite through the poetic Comet Crash 9 -- a tribute to the famous Shoemaker Levy 9, which rocketed into Jupiter at the very moment the work's tracks were first laid and later infused with the famous Gerard Manley Hopkins text, I am Like a Slip of Comet... -- and on to the title track setting of the poetic tribute to the composer's own cosmic canine, Dog Star, Gabel relentlessly pursues the outer limits of electroacoustic poesy with works dating from the early eighties to some of his most recent collaborations with such upcoming Northwest artists as flutist Tessa Brinckman in The Wind and the Rain."
-- Hudební rozhledy

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[ 1 ] Somewhere Suite (1st mov.)	LISTEN
[ 2 ] Somewhere Suite (2nd mov.)	LISTEN
[ 3 ] Somewhere Suite (3rd mov.)	LISTEN
[ 4 ] Dog Star	LISTEN
[ 5 ] Myriam's Dance	LISTEN
[ 6 ] Metro Dreams	LISTEN
[ 7 ] When Nobody's Looking	LISTEN
[ 8 ] Rail Ride	LISTEN
[ 9 ] Comet Crash 9	LISTEN
[10] Waltzing the Sun	LISTEN
[11] Consommation Mècanique	LISTEN
[12] Wind and the Rain	LISTEN