Albums
The Natural World (2018)
Aging Magician (2017)
Big Farm (2013)
Lonely Motel -Grammy Award Winner (2011)
Sandhills Reunion (2004)
Ravenshead (1998)
Story In, Story Out (1997)
Do the day over (1995)
Slow Fire (1992)
Finding My Way Home (1992)
The Natural World
Label: National Sawdust Tracks
Released: 2018
Having collaborated on numerous highly acclaimed recordings over the course of his varied and celebrated career, The Natural World marks Eckert’s first completely solo “solo album,” in that all vocals and instruments (including guitars, piano, electronic keyboards/samples, accordion, South American wood flute, hand percussion, tenor banjo, dobro ukulele, banjo ukulele, shruti box and penny whistle) are provided by Eckert himself. Following a two-month, cross-country journey playing solo concerts, he entered the studio with longtime collaborator and producer Lee Townsend (Bill Frisell, John Scofield, Kelly Joe Phelps) and created a record that explores where the classical meets the vernacular and the earthly meets the spiritual — all with an eye toward offering empathy and vision in polarized times.
AGING MAGICIAN
LABEL: NATIONAL SAWDUST TRACKS
RELEASED: 2017
Music by Paola Prestini
Libretto by Rinde Eckert
Directed and Designed by Julian Crouch
AGING MAGICIAN is an epic new opera-theater work that tells the story of Harold, an aging clockmaker near the end of his unusual life. A string quartet and Brooklyn Youth Chorus help Harold uncover his legacy as the New Victory stage is transformed into a living, breathing instrument. Creators Julian Crouch (Shockheaded Peter, New Vic 1999), Rinde Eckert, Paola Prestini, Mark Stewart and the Attacca Quartet bring together the worlds of music, theater, puppetry, instrument making and scenic design to paint this poignant allegory on time, youth and the peculiar magic of ordinary life, or perhaps, the ordinary magic of a peculiar life. – Courtesy of The New Victory Theater
Co-created by composer Paola Prestini, writer & performer Rinde Eckert, and director & designer Julian Crouch. Instrument designer Mark Stewart. Co-scenic design & costume design by Amy C. Rubin. Video & lighting design by Josh Higgason. Recorded at National Sawdust by Marc Urselli, with technical assistance by Zach Rosenberg. Mixed and Mastered by Marc Urselli. Produced by Paola Prestini. Album art and libretto design by Michael Cina. All drawings by Rinde Eckert except where noted. Performances by Rinde Eckert, members of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus (Dianne Berkun- Menaker, founder and music director) and Attacca Quartet (Amy Schroeder, violin; Keiko Tokunaga, violin; Nathan Schram, viola; Andrew Yee, cello).
Commissioned by VisionIntoArt, Beth Morrison Projects, Walker Art Center, and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.
Big Farm
Label: Good Child Music
Released: 2013
Alexandra Sopp - Flute
Mary Jo Stilp - Violin
Kiku Enomoto - Violin
Christiana Liberis - Viola
Rubin Kodheli - Cello
produced by Lawson White
Rinde Eckert, Mark Haanstra, Steven Mackey and Jason Treuting. The Band answers a call to each of these musicians to a place where the rules normative to the hard genres of music are set aside, making it possible for the group to express the eclecticism of tis members. It is a place where serious counterpoint can meet burlesque, earnestness meet abandon; a place where they can kick it or take it to tea, reflect, attack, mourn, dance, pray, or mock with ease or determination, joy or fervor, using any and all means necessary. This world is a Big Farm...lots of different crops, changing weather, livestock, and a duck pond for good measure.
This work made possible [in part] by the Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards Program and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Lonely Motel
Music from Slide
Grammy Winner 2011 | best small ensemble performance
Lonely Motel is the world premiere recording of songs from the startlingly innovative music and theater work Slide, written for new-music sextet eighth blackbird, an ensemble of wind, string, piano, and percussion virtuosos. The group, with composer-electric guitarist Steven Mackey and singer, actor, and librettist Rinde Eckert, premiered the concert-length work at the 2009 Ojai Music Festival in Southern California, a mecca for cutting-edge music enthusiasts. The same forces perform on the new CD, which takes its title from the final song in the cycle.
Eckert plays the central character, Renard, a fictional research psychologist whose fiancée has abandoned him. The heartbroken Renard reminisces about an experiment he conducted using projections of photographic slides to explore the fallibility of human perception.
Lonely Motel's 11 songs are about 'self-delusion and, ultimately, the isolation created by the attachments we develop to our own fuzzy, personal views of reality,' eighth blackbird says. Musically, the songs contain subtle homages to Dowland, Mozart, Stravinsky, Piazzola, and The Beatles.
Sandhills Reunion
Label: Songlines Recordings
ReleaseD: November 1, 2004
Rinde Eckert - voice
Francois Houle - clarinet
Jeff Reilly - bass clarinet
David Mott - baritone sax
Cristoph Both - cello
Christian Kogel - electric and acoustic guitars
J. Anthony Granelli - bass, lap steel guitar
Jerry Granelli - drums, samples
From Songlines: "A multi-layered interweaving of words and music that Granelli calls an audio movie or play. The text, written and performed by actor/playwright/singer Rinde Eckert, is a glancingly linked sequence of reflections, imaginings, internal monologues and one historically accurate dialogue (“Twenty Questions for an Outlaw”) using the persona of Billy the Kid as a thematic touchstone and the Sandhills region of northwestern Nebraska as the landscape of memory and desire."
"Jerry Granelli asked me to put a text to a suite of pieces he had already composed. The original texts had to be tossed because of some legal complications. So I listened to the thing and wrote my own story. I’d just gotten back from Nebraska (my first residency toward the making of Horizon). I’d been taken to the Sandhills, that glorious prairie that comprises pretty much all of northwest Nebraska. There is something simple and grand here. Again, I would suggest you sit with it for the duration. Beautiful, sensitive playing. Subtle. Also, these little stories are some of the best stories I’ve ever written." - Rinde Eckert
Ravenshead
Release: 1998
"BEST NEW OPERA OF 1998” - USA TODAY
Composer Steve Mackey and Librettist’s Rinde Eckert’s one man tour-de-force opera commissioned by the Paul Dresher Ensemble and performed by Rinde Eckert and the Ensemble’s Electro-Acoustic Band. Premiered in Nov. 1998, it is based on the a true story of Donald Crowhurst, a man who in 1968 attempted to be the first to sail solo & non-stop around in the world. Rinde’s writing and performance are nothing short of astonishing. Recorded digitally live, Two CDs, 95 min..
Story In, Story Out
Label: Intuition
ReleaseD: 1997
"Here are two narrative suites of about twenty-six minutes each. The first, Three Days In The Sun chronicles a magical hitchhiking trip I took in ’74. The last, Four Songs Lost In A Wall is the compliment to the first. Actually it’s the other way around, Four Songs came before Three Days. In any case one is about the vastness of the Western landscape and the other is an urbane and charged interior landscape, thus: Story In Story Out. This you have to listen to from beginning to end. Take an hour, sit back and let it do its thing. When you arrive at the last cut Winding The World, I think you’ll see what I mean." - Rinde Eckert
Three Days In The Sun:
Rinde Eckert- vocals, 10-string slide guitar, harmonica, organ, pipe
with Jerry Granelli & UFB
Christian Kögel - electric & acoustic guitars
Kai Brückner - electric & acoustic guitars
Andreas Walter - bass
Jerry Granelli - drums, percussion
Four Songs Lost in a Wall:
Rinde Eckert - voices, piano, organ, baritone horn with
Jim Kassis - drums
Will Bernard - electric guitar
Clark Suprynowicz - acoustic & electric bass
Do the Day Over
Label: City of Tribes
Release: 1996
"..my second CD. I had material left over from FMWH. Lee Townsend, my excellent producer, and I put together another kind of journey: from a kind of loneliness and lostness to a serenity in marriage (still, of course, not without some irony). So the thing starts out with this cri de coeur in Clean Out of Churches into the cover of Dylan’s Ring Them Bells. It ends with Lost Without You, a tribute to my lovely wife Ellen McLaughlin. " - Rinde Eckert
Rinde Eckert - vocals, organ, piano, accordion, bells
Aina Kemanis - vocals
Will Bernard - electric guitar, slide guitar
Rob Vlack - piano, organ, synth, samples
Clark Suprynowicz - electric and acoustic bass
Jim Kassis - drums, percussion
Danny Carnahan - octave mandolin, acoustic guitar
produced by Lee Townsend
Finding My Way Home
Label: Disk Union
ReleaseD: 1992
"..my first solo (i.e. my own work) recording. Notables Bill Frisell and Jerry Granelli play on it. The guitar playing of Will Bernard is also notable here. The CD is a kind of chronicle of a journey across America. Picture yourself on a car trip after your girl friend dumps you. Start on the east coast on I-80 and keep going until you hit San Francisco. Listen to it in one sitting if you have the time. The last seventeen-minute suite Heaven In His Eyes ends with a drum solo by Jerry that will truly knock you out." - Rinde Eckert
Rinde Eckert - vocals, piano, organ, accordion, pipe, samples
Will Bernard - electric guitar, acoustic slide guitar
Bill Frisell - electric guitar, electric slide guitar, bass
Clark Suprynowicz - electric bass
Jim Kassis - drums, percussion
Jerry Granelli - drums, percussion
Suzy Thompson - violin
produced by Lee Townsend
Slow Fire
Release: 1992
A high quality 1992 studio recording of the first work in the Paul Dresher Ensemble's American Trilogy." Composed by Dresher, written and performed by Rinde Eckert and directed by Richard E.T. White, Slow Fire is considered a masterpiece of multi-disciplinary collaboration and has been performed over 200 times throughout the US and Europe.