The Good Feeling
by Ken Dryden
Bassist Christian McBride was already turning heads as a teenaged sideman with Benny Green during the early '90s, showcasing formidable technique and imagination in his solos. Over the two decades since then, McBride has demonstrated his skills as a bandleader, composer, and arranger as well. After 15 years of studying big-band charts, experimenting, and writing, McBride developed sufficient material for a CD, recruiting some of New York's best and busiest players, including saxophonists Steve Wilson, Ron Blake, and Loren Schoenberg, trumpeters Nicholas Payton and Frank Greene, and trombonists Steve Davis,Michael Dease, and Douglas Purviance, plus pianist Xavier Davis and drummer Ulysses Owens (among others). Six of the 11 pieces are originals, highlighted by the funky, playful "Bluesin' in Alphabet City," the ambitious, multifaceted "Science Fiction," and the upbeat, boisterous post-bop cooker "The Shade of the Cedar Tree." Vocalist Melissa Walker shines on several tracks, including a warm setting of "When I Fall in Love" that opens with the leader's arco solo and a pulsating rendition of Bobby Scott's "A Taste of Honey" that is scored with rich ensemble work behind the singer. The solos by McBride, Blake, Wilson, and Dease especially stand out, though everyone who takes a turn delivers a top-drawer effort. With this fine effort, it's safe to say that Christian McBride's talents as a writer have grown to match his considerable chops as a bassist.
The Tierney Sutton Band
American Road
by Ken DrydenTierney Sutton has long been a wide-ranging explorer as a vocalist, not satisfied with the standard jazz canon or typical approaches to songs. Together with her long-running band (pianist Christian Jacob, bassists Trey Henry and Kevin Axt, plus drummer Ray Brinker, all but one of whom have been with her since prior to her 1998 debut CD), Sutton finds songs she likes and works with her musicians to create provocative arrangements that keep the essence of melodies within reach while making thoughtful use of space and surprising rhythms. Opening with a focus on traditional songs, Sutton's warm voice is complemented by Brinker's hip backbeat and Jacob's darting piano. Her medley of "Oh Shenandoah" and "The Water Is Wide" is full of surprises, with her rich wordless vocal in the former bracketing the latter as its centerpiece, with Jacob interweaving "Oh Shenandoah" into his backing of the singer in "The Water Is Wide." The humorous introduction to George Gershwin's "It Ain't Necessarily So" sounds like one of the two themes from Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse," though the piece quickly takes an ominous turn in Sutton's dramatic, driving setting. Two more pieces from Porgy and Bess follow, a harmonically rich yet melancholy "Summertime" and a powerful "My Man's Gone Now" that incorporates an insistent vamp to increase its emotional impact. Sutton also explores the music of Broadway with three selections from the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim hit musical West Side Story, highlighted by her moving treatment of "Somewhere." The finale is a harmonically rich duet with Jacob of "America the Beautiful," a beloved song that jazz vocalists have long overlooked.
Alan Pasqua
Twin Bill: Two Piano Music Of Bill Evans
By Marc Myers at JazzWax
It takes a lot of courage for a pianist to take on Bill Evans. It requires even more courage for that pianist to overdub himself recording Evans' songs. After all, any pianist who would attempt such a thing would be asking for a ton of trouble. Evans fans are pretty particular, passionate and protective of the late pianist and have a low tolerance for intruders. Unless, of course, a pianist paying tribute to Evans actually pulled it off. Alan Pasqua does just that on Twin Bill: Two Piano Music of Bill Evans.
But let's back up. I generally don't care for Evans tribute albums. My feeling is Evans aced everything he recorded, and the last thing I generally want to hear is someone else's interpretation of his definitive versions. So I was already suspect when I spied Pasqua's album title.
Next is the double-decker gimmick. Evans recorded two albums in which he overdubbed himself using multitrack recording techniques—Conversations with Myself (1963) and Further Conversations with Myself (1967). So the fact that Pasqua was trying to pull off something akin to Yet Even Further Conversations seemed a bit gauling—like breaking into a museum and putting your feet up on an exhibit's furniture.
Flippng the CD over, I noticed that the track list included Take Me Out to the Ballgame, Vindarna Sucka Uti Skogarna and Grace—songs that Bill Evans never recorded. Now, I thought, we were into appalling territory. This would be our museum chap breaking out a tuna sandwich.
Furiously tearing open the plastic, I slipping on the CD, fully expecting to hit eject after about eight bars into the first track. But a funny thing happened on the way to the trash. I actually loved what I heard.
Pasqua manages to pull off his triple play by employing crystal clear reverence for Evans and his lyrical space-swing technique. These tracks aren't ape jobs, in which a pianist does his or her best to sound as though they are playing Evans transcriptions. Instead, they are solid, reverential interpretations that live inside Evans' style and soul.
From Very Early and Gloria's Step to Nardis and Interplay, Pasqua delivers a full, lush Evans tribute. In his overdubs, Pasqua focused less on attempting the complex, fairy-delicate musical dialogues that Evans pulled off in his Conversations albums. Rather, Pasqua wisely uses the overdub to give this music heft and dynamism, always mindful of Evans' sensitivity and style.
As for Take Me Out to the Ballgame, it actually works. Evans, of course, wasn't above vamping children's songs or radio jingles. He had great fun recording Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, Little Lulu and the WNEW Theme in the '60s. Paqua plays Ballgame as a waltz, and darned if his harmony choices don't sound like Evans himself. Pasqua leaves the listener feeling as though the master himself were sitting at the keyboard, his head bent over, his eyes closed.
Oh, one more thing. Pasqua bravely left himself open on yet a fourth front. Did I mention that this is a solo album?
Brad Mehldau & Kevin Hays
Modern Music
“Orvieto” (ECM) is the splashier and more casual of the two: a concert recording starring Chick Corea, the eminent American post-bop pianist who turned 70 this year, and Stefano Bollani, a quick-thinking Italian of similar effervescence, now 38. Recorded at last year’s Umbria Jazz Winter festival, it involved the barest preparation — loose set list, no rehearsals — but some favorable odds.JAZZ pianists spend a lot of time alone with their craft, and often just as much in the context of a rhythm section. It’s less common for them to sit down and make music with each other, though it does happen every now and then. (It happened a lot in the 1930s among Harlem stride masters, behind closed doors, in clubby camaraderie.) The scarcity is enough to make you notice a good piano-duo album when it arrives. This fall, oddly enough, there are a few, two of them due out on Tuesday.
For one thing, Mr. Corea has an unusually productive track record in two-piano settings, going back to “An Evening With Herbie Hancock & Chick Corea: In Concert,” released on Columbia in 1978. And he has a few years of history with Mr. Bollani, on European stages. Their buoyant, bustling take on a standard like “If I Should Lose You” (or, for that matter, Dorival Caymmi’s “Doralice”) feels brisk, companionable and practically seamless. Mr. Bollani has compared their output to the work of one pianist with four hands, which sounds fanciful and self-serving until you absorb the results.
“Modern Music” (Nonesuch), featuring Brad Mehldau and Kevin Hays, is a less joyous album, perhaps because it carries the burden of an agenda. It’s also the greater achievement. Mr. Mehldau and Mr. Hays, both in their early 40s, don’t have to work to find common ground, so they focus instead on bringing a high sheen to some choice material: one repurposed original each; potent adaptations of works by Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Ornette Coleman; and four intricate pieces by Patrick Zimmerli.
That last name appears on the album cover, and for good reason: Mr. Zimmerli, a product of the same high school jazz program as Mr. Mehldau, is responsible for the album’s stern, ingenious arrangements, which reflect his foothold in contemporary classical music. Mr. Zimmerli’s writing is intricately plotted; where there’s space for improvisation he lays useful traps, seeking to thwart the reflexive fluency of his players.
Still, in the end what you notice isn’t Mr. Zimmerli’s invisible hand, or even the four belonging to Mr. Mehldau and Mr. Hays. What sticks out is the feverish concentration of the whole enterprise, along with an idea long espoused, convincingly, by Mr. Corea: that it’s all music, flowing heedlessly across the boundaries of style.
Augusto Pirodda
No Comment
A standard comic-strip theme presents the wise man sitting cross-legged on a remote mountain top, contemplating life, the human condition, God. A searcher from the temporal world below climbs the mountain and asks the wise man a question of profound importance. The last frame of the strip is a joke, the wise man's answer that steers the potentially sublime into the depths of the ridiculous; a good laugh at our expense. But the universal quest for truth remains constant, and is the central motivation for the creation of most great art.
39 year-old Italian pianist Augusto Pirodda didn't climb a mountain; he found his wise men, his jazz priests—octogenarian drummer Paul Motian and septuagenarian bassist Gary Peacock—in New York City.
The music this trio makes on Pirodda's No Comment is solemn and prayer-like, with an extraordinary degree of equilibrium of input between the musicians—a hallmark of a good percent of the art of the piano trio since the release of pianist Bill Evans' Sunday at the Village Vanguard (Riverside, 1961), an album on which Motian also performed. Motian's drumming—then and now—is pure poetry, leaning away from the timekeeping chore a good deal of the time to create subtle orchestral percussion worlds, hinting in the gentlest whispers of great elusive truths, seeming separate from, but augmenting, the pianist's search. Peacock—a vital artist in his own right, but most famous for his participation in pianist Keith Jarrett's long-standing Standards Trio—answers Pirodda's questions, remarks on his statements, and makes deep, vibrant statements of his own that garner succinct and well-chosen replies from the leader.
"Spare" is a key word when speaking of Pirodda's piano art. There is a folk song-like simplicity to his approach, with no wasted notes, making space a big part of his sound. The set opens with the dark-toned and gorgeously ruminative "It Begins Like This..." a collaborative, on-the-spot trio composition that was actually the recording session's sound check. "I Don't Know" is another spontaneous composition, beginning with a bass/drums duet—Peacock preaching, Motian adding a whispering chant—before Pirodda joins in, working the piano's left end, responding to Peacock's pronouncements.
Pirodda contributes four of his own compositions to the set, with "Brrribop" the most agitated and restless segment of the CD. "Ola" is the least abstract and possesses the brightest sound, with Peacock creeping stealthily through Motian's ephemeral weave, as Pirodda experiments with some dissonance.
With four previous CDs to his name, Pirodda is no neophyte, but as an acolyte of sorts to the Peacock/Motian pairing, he has taken his piano trio artistry to the highest level.
Track Listing:
It Begins Like This...; Seak Fruits; Brribop; No Comment; So?; Il Suo Preferito; I Don't Know; Ola.
Personnel:
39 year-old Italian pianist Augusto Pirodda didn't climb a mountain; he found his wise men, his jazz priests—octogenarian drummer Paul Motian and septuagenarian bassist Gary Peacock—in New York City.
The music this trio makes on Pirodda's No Comment is solemn and prayer-like, with an extraordinary degree of equilibrium of input between the musicians—a hallmark of a good percent of the art of the piano trio since the release of pianist Bill Evans' Sunday at the Village Vanguard (Riverside, 1961), an album on which Motian also performed. Motian's drumming—then and now—is pure poetry, leaning away from the timekeeping chore a good deal of the time to create subtle orchestral percussion worlds, hinting in the gentlest whispers of great elusive truths, seeming separate from, but augmenting, the pianist's search. Peacock—a vital artist in his own right, but most famous for his participation in pianist Keith Jarrett's long-standing Standards Trio—answers Pirodda's questions, remarks on his statements, and makes deep, vibrant statements of his own that garner succinct and well-chosen replies from the leader.
"Spare" is a key word when speaking of Pirodda's piano art. There is a folk song-like simplicity to his approach, with no wasted notes, making space a big part of his sound. The set opens with the dark-toned and gorgeously ruminative "It Begins Like This..." a collaborative, on-the-spot trio composition that was actually the recording session's sound check. "I Don't Know" is another spontaneous composition, beginning with a bass/drums duet—Peacock preaching, Motian adding a whispering chant—before Pirodda joins in, working the piano's left end, responding to Peacock's pronouncements.
Pirodda contributes four of his own compositions to the set, with "Brrribop" the most agitated and restless segment of the CD. "Ola" is the least abstract and possesses the brightest sound, with Peacock creeping stealthily through Motian's ephemeral weave, as Pirodda experiments with some dissonance.
With four previous CDs to his name, Pirodda is no neophyte, but as an acolyte of sorts to the Peacock/Motian pairing, he has taken his piano trio artistry to the highest level.
Track Listing:
It Begins Like This...; Seak Fruits; Brribop; No Comment; So?; Il Suo Preferito; I Don't Know; Ola.
Personnel:
Augusto Pirodda: piano; Gary Peacok: bass; Paul Motian: drums
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