Tracking Lucidity

It took Michael Halaas two years to produce his latest CD, The Lucidity Project. It wasn’t just that he has a full-time day job as associate director of web and multimedia services at the Medical School. The 45-minute disc features piano, guitar, cello, vocals, drums and other percussion, often simultaneously—but only two musicians: Halaas, ’93, and the well-known cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, a 20-year veteran of the Kronos Quartet. That required a painstaking process of separately recording the many parts for each instrument, then layering together the tracks, up to 80 or 90 in some cases. Halaas describes the 10 works—nine composed by him—as “contemporary classical.” Others might call his music New Age: simple melodic lines backed by pulsing, tidelike rhythms. Think Pachelbel’s Canon in D—with tribal tangents and the odd excursion to India. Halaas has nine other CDs to his credit: four solo piano, two multi-instrumental and three with the singer Nyree (Belleville, ’94), as “the girl & I.”