For years I had seen this album staring back at me from the avant-garde section at Amoeba Hollywood, where I had worked years ago. But despite my adoring his Out of the Blue and Country Boy Country Dog (How To Discover Music in the Sounds of Your Daily Life), to say nothing of Detours’ appealingly late 1990s-esque cover, I never took a chance on the album. Having finally acquired it during Unseen Worlds’ coronavirus relief sale, all I can ask is: What took so long?
Tyranny unspools thread after lyric thread of lyricism, while gently peeling off the veneer of pretense and affectation that have encrusted themselves upon minimalism post-John Adams. It is simultaneously a distillation and an encapsulated retrospective of Tyranny’s art. Wafting by are traces of influences, of musical doings long ago; bits of parlor song calling out across the chasm of time, the sprightly chatter of synthesizers wryly answering back. their wistfulness augmenting this music’s crepuscular feel. It is music borne of a lifetime’s strivings, hopes, heartbreaks, joys; untouched by bitterness; filled only with gratitude.
If Bartók had his “night music,” then in Detours “Blue” Gene Tyranny gives the listener “twilight music”: Rarefied musical visions which dance along the shimmering frontier straddling waking and repose.
A quiet milestone in the work of a modern American master.
Laid back melancholia: “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s Detours.