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Raymond Hawkins' first album release, Spicy Sauce, is now available in CD format! Click the "buy now" button below to order your copy today!
You won't want to miss this new recorded collection of favorite organ works by the great French composer, Louis Vierne, performed by Raymond Hawkins on the C. B. Fisk organ at St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
Keep scrolling down for more information about the album (and a free sample), but don't forget to scroll back up and place your order!
About the album...
Just for appearances I thought I should lecture them a bit on the difference between excess and propriety. But, deep down, I was laughing with them at the large dose of spicy sauce forced down those gentlemen who were used to listening to sweet tidbits and swooning with delight.
—Louis Vierne, Mes souvenirs
While Louis Vierne was acting as substitute organ professor at the Conservatoire de Paris for several months in the late nineteenth century, he encouraged his students' predilections for playing edgy, harmonically daring improvisations. Apparently, Vierne's encouragement showed through in their performances before a handful of stuffy adjudicators at the conservatory's trimester exam in January 1898, the event that prompted the "spicy sauce" comment in his memoirs.
Even before I discovered this quote, my musical colleagues and I would often choose non-musical jargon to describe particularly jazzy or dissonant harmonies—words like 'juicy,' 'nasty,' and, not infrequently, 'spicy.' To know that one of my favorite composers also used such descriptions emboldened me to continue the habit. With this shared vocabulary, it seemed only appropriate that my debut album, a collection of some of Vierne's finest organ works, should be named "Spicy Sauce."
If you want to sample some of this "spicy sauce" before you guzzle the whole album, click on the video below. If you already know you have a high tolerance for heat, just scroll on back up and click the "buy now" button. Disclaimer: purchase does not include a glass of milk.
