For those unaware, Shakespeare buffs know soliloquies as intimate dramatic monologues in which characters stand alone on stage to confide their innermost thoughts and feelings directly to the audience, but how might an artist like Jason Kao Hwang reconceive this practice in an improvisational context, where author and character are one and the same, and their musical statement is composed as extemporaneously as words freely spoken?

The fascinating possibilities that Jason explores in these solo violin improvisations open new vistas into the autobiographical aspects of his own distinctive musical language, as developed and deployed in musically reimagined moments to bridge the cultural-historical gulf dividing his family’s first- and second-generation immigrant experiences.

1. At the Beginning
2. Hungry Shadows
3. Vagabond
4. Spinning Coins
5. Remembering Our Conversation
6. Where the River Runs Both Ways
7. Dreams Dream
8. Silhouettes Lean Forward
9. Encirclement
10. Bending Branches into Books
11. Shards
12. Before God

This majestically flawless, and wholly embodied new recording opens on the transformational, and aptly-titled At the Beginning and the sculpted preciseness of Hungry Shadows and then brings forth the embodied Vagabond, the fluttering Spinning Coins, the alluring Remembering Our Conversation and then we get the delicately phrased Where the River Runs Both Ways.

Along next is the articulate Dreams Dream and the gently flirtatious Silhouettes Lean Forward and they are backed seamlessly by the resoundingly attune Encirclement, a sympathetic resonance that veins throughout Bending Branches into Books, the album rounding out on the veritably crystalline Shards, coming to a close on the intricately explorative Before God.

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