Dominik Wania piano Recorded November 2019, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano Engineer: Stefano Amerio Cover: Fidel Sclavo Produced by Manfred Eicher Release date: September 18, 2020
After contributing so beautifully to two albums—Unloved and Three Crowns—as part of the Maciej Obara Quartet, pianist Dominik Wania offers this studio recording of solo improvisations. While Wania notes a range of influences drawing from his classical background, including Satie, Weber, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Ravel, and Messiaen, he seems to have taken cues from these composers as emotional rather than technical suggestions. In doing so, he unravels a trajectory that feels fresh yet familiar in the sense of reuniting with a friend one hasn’t seen in decades. Thus, the light step with which the title track opens seeks the future as if it were the past. As the atmosphere builds and more notes enter the scene, a narrative structure suggests itself. And yet, the characters seem not to know each other. They walk by without acknowledgement, meshing in their indifference.
“New Life Experience” is the first among a handful of expository wonders. If this and the sharper attack of “Relativity” feel more jarring, it’s only because they speak of a musician unafraid to examine himself. Each agitation unpacks itself with philosophical rigor. And if “Think Twice” and “AG76” are heard as darker autobiographies, then “Subjective Objectivity” and “Indifferent Attitude” reveal a playful side. The latter is especially virtuosic but uses its acumen to tell more than show.
To my ears, Wania understands that music is nothing if not a reifying force. Despite the ephemeral implications of “Melting Spirit” and “Liquid Fluid” in titles alone, their lyrical charge makes them fully present as entities in their own right. They guide us “Towards The Light” by reminding us of the fleshly struggles of which life itself is composed as we now search for something divine in a world bogged down by cloud of a pandemic. Opening our eyes to a brighter tomorrow, “All What Remains” suspends itself in prayer, the requiting of which will never materialize until we close our mouths and open our ears.
This music is a sentient river acknowledging the obstructions that define its winding trajectory. It would be nothing without impediment, each rock and fallen tree a challenge to redefine itself at every turn. This is precisely what Lonely Shadows can be at its freest moments—a continuity through the traumas we carry inside before the ocean of mortality swallows them whole.
Marthe Lea clarinet, voice, percussion Ayumi Tanaka piano Thomas Strønen drums, percussion Recorded August 2018, Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano Engineer: Lara Persia Cover photo: Caterina Di Perri Produced by Manfred Eicher Release date: April 9, 2021
From Thomas Strønen’s Time Is A Blind Guide emerges the drummer/bandleader alongside pianist Ayumi Tanaka, delineating a fresh triangle with clarinetist/vocalist/percussionist Marthe Lea. Though metaphysically grounded in free explorations of musical moments, Bayou has a rhizomatic quality that blends apparent influences ranging from Claude Debussy to Jimmy Giuffre. These genetic strands and more feel cohesive in their new body, intertwining in search of (and in fleeting possession of) wonder.
After immersing myself in this album’s details, I arranged a video chat with Strønen to explore its genesis and inner lives. I first asked him about the relationship between this trio and Time Is A Blind Guide. His response:
“It’s everything and nothing, in a way. I think the similarities are quite obvious in that I like working on space and all the things that are not said. But this trio is totally improvised, while Time Is A Blind Guide is my play garden. I see my role in it more as a composer than as a drummer. I know where the music is heading. The main idea of the trio was to explore ground rather than perform, without the pressure to be or turn into anything. By accident, we got asked to play somewhere. I recorded that concert on one microphone and played it for Manfred. He said it sounded very fresh and insisted that we bring it to the studio. We recorded for three hours in the morning. We had lunch, then started mixing. It was very relaxed. It was also the first time I recorded totally improvised for ECM and we were excited to see whether we could bring about the same interplay we had experienced during rehearsals.”
Having two different versions of the title track speaks to this multifaceted approach, through which one face reveals new features when illuminated differently. Yielding a Norwegian folk tune, it parallels the whisper of Strønen’s brushes with the raindrops of piano, bringing forth a touchless space in which breath becomes the language of primary communication. The song emerges on its own wings but hovers within sight like a hummingbird in dream-like slow motion—watching, waiting, and listening.
Strønen parallels this impression:
“Music is integral to their lives. I think you can hear that in the way they play. It’s not just skills or training but an extremely strong will to create an atmosphere and interplay that’s larger than all of us. We’re different musicians but we have the same attitude toward playing music, despite our distinct roles in a band. Ayumi and I are more delicate, but we never know what Marthe will pull out next. For example, this record was the first time she sung in the context of this trio. She is a free bird who stirs things up and makes them alive.”
“Pasha” skims wider waters, alighting at last on shore. The surface tension of the pond becomes the page for a delicate grammar, the arrangement of which etches its poetry where ink cannot remain. “Water was always with us,” says Strønen, who knew the trio and its music would be aquatic in nature. Beyond that, however, nothing was planned.
Lea’s clarinet in “Duryea” lends insight into the inner workings of flight as it navigates the tangle of forest brush it calls home. To that daylit scene “Nahla” and “Varsha” are the night—a tender submersion of cellular mapmaking for the impending dawn. The creaking of tired trees bracing themselves for winter melds with subtle changes in temperature and air current.
One aspect that makes this music so special is its lack of allegiance to dialogue. It renders different parts of a shared scene while finding sameness through difference. It has no other protagonist than the landscape itself, replete with waterways, pockets of lichen, and lives of its own. Such are the winding journeys of “Eyre” and the amphibious diary that is “Dwyn.” In these are whispers of distant climates as yet untouched by the trio’s collective dreaming. Strønen elaborates on the inner dynamics at play:
“What I like in this ensemble is that we are not necessarily talking to each other but always listening. Parallel musical ideas are going on at the same time with really big ears from all three of us. It’s a challenging way of communicating—trusting that what you do is essential to what the others do but not in a conventional way. The essence is still there whether I am present or not. Jazz is usually about leading to a special point; we are not searching for that. Ours is a more parallel way of communicating.”
Nowhere more so than in “Como” (an album highlight for its suspended qualities and understated glory), which coaxes the sun from its slumber before it dissipates the mist of “Chantara.” This is, perhaps, why Lea hums wordlessly, as no form of human meaning can capture that which refuses to be caged by semantics.
“It’s common for a record to define a band. This has the side effect of getting onto a one-way street. I can find myself wanting to recreate what we did on a record, but listening later I am happy to find out it didn’t. You play what you are.”
A profound reminder that we listen what we are as well. The bayou is a mirror and we are its reflection.
Vijay Iyer piano Linda May Han Oh double bass Tyshawn Sorey drums Recorded December 2019 at Oktaven Audio Studio, Mount Vernon, NY Engineer: Ryan Streber Mastering: Christoph Stickel Cover photo: Woong Chul An Produced by Vijay Iyer and Manfred Eicher Release date: April 9, 2021
while in the midst of horror we fed on beauty – and that, my love, is what sustained us. –Rita Dove
The term “microaggression,” often thrown around in today’s politically wounded climate, is a misnomer. There’s nothing “micro” about the injustice that a (seemingly) offhanded remark can inflict. Such impacts are felt at the macro level, returning to the systemic ashes from which they spring like so many phoenixes of abuse. These feelings and more circulate throughout my blood vessels as I listen to Uneasy, Vijay Iyer’s seventh leader date for ECM. Says the pianist of his chosen title, “Maybe, since the word contains its own opposite, it reminds us that the most soothing, healing music is often born of and situated within profound unrest; and conversely, the most turbulent music may contain stillness, coolness, even wisdom.” To unpack this semantic time capsule, he welcomes bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey into a studio workout of spectral proportions.
The opening “Children Of Flint,” like much of what follows, bears the scars of recent social history. Dedicated to the residents of its titular Michigan town, where families were tragically deprived of safe drinking water from 2014 to 2019, it blends its first blush into a firmament of bass and piano before cymbals greet a new day. Already, we know that we are in for distinctly animate(d) music that moves like the wind: swift, powerful, and able to adapt to any structure that would threaten to impede its passage. “Combat Breathing” (the latter word, of course, completing a larger-than-ever circuit of tragedy) handles its subjects with equal care. Oh and Sorey till a powerful soil into which Iyer throws handful after handful of melodic seeds. Oh waters them with her solo, keeping one set of fingers on the strings and the other curled around Sorey’s hand as they navigate the rays of a setting sun.
This diurnal cycle of life requires stasis to explode and vice versa. Hence, the melodic forest that is Cole Porter’s “Night And Day,” which in this iteration inhales more than it exhales, as if to protect itself from the political oxygen deprivation of which it was an unwitting(?) reflection. The bassing is so exquisite in its regard for textural detail, a signal of agency and purpose. Drawing on McToy Tyner’s cartographic precedent, it is the very embodiment of exposition as practice. The polyrhythmic “Drummer’s Song” is a nod to another master composer, Geri Allen, whose spirit blossoms in this rendition, born of an obvious amount of consideration. Each movement connects to the next, ball to socket, until the choreography lays itself on an altar of forgiveness.
“Touba” (cowritten with Mike Ladd) has a more insistent quality, which by its understatement pulls a thread of unwavering allyship through varicolored beads. Iyer’s unbound spirit here is glorious, singing of freedom without forgetting the sacrifices suffered to flex it like the historical muscle it has become, while the groove-oriented “Configurations” reveals a sonic Rubik’s cube that trio coaxes it into a solved state by breath alone. In this instance, virtuosity is a necessary means of engagement. Sorey’s drumming glistens with the persuasiveness of an ice cream cone in July.
The title track is the album’s solemn soul. Fueled by self-awareness and grit, it sheds its aquatic nature to run on land. A phenomenal yet brief image takes shape when Iyer plays single high notes, as if suspending the action before diving into the fray. If this one looks inward, then “Retrofit” looks forward, holding on to that which is good instead of merely abandoning it for the sake of the new. This is the trio’s M.O.
“Entrustment” imbues the proceedings with subtle finality. It treads carefully so as not to hurt those it wishes to protect. This primes a canvas for brushstrokes of every imaginable thickness, each a window into a life that matters. Like the solo piano improvisation, “Augury,” that bathes us along the way, it manifests an internal spirit using external vocabularies, weaving a tapestry of foresight into the pandemic that loomed just beyond the horizon of its recording. Its poignancy finds solidarity throughout Uneasy, which affords a bird’s-eye view of our violent world, a place where even unrest must succumb to slumber. Knowing we cannot stop it alone, prayers like this are a necessity because they remind us that, even as we chant the memories of a select view, 99% of those who met the same fate are names we will never know, swept by the largest of brooms under the asphalt carpet. Let us take the five seconds with which this album starts, then, as an opportunity to reflect on what this music touches: the fragility of identity.
Terje Rypdal electric guitar Ståle Storløkken keyboards Endre Hareide Hallre fretless bass, Fender Precision Pål Thowsen drums, percussion Recorded February 2019 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo Engineer: Martin Abrahamsen Mixing: January 2020 by Manfred Eicher, Terje Rypdal, and Martin Abrahamsen (engineer) Cover photo: Woong Chul An Produced by Manfred Eicher Release date: September 11, 2020
For his first studio album in twenty years, Norwegian guitarist and composer Terje Rypdal convenes the talents of Ståle Storløkken (made familiar to Rypdal fans by his contributions to Vossabryggand Crime Scene) on keyboards, Pål Thowsen (whose association with ECM dates back to Arild Andersen’s projects during the label’s first decade) on drums and percussion, and the youngest recruit, Endre Hareid Hallre, on fretless and Fender Precision basses. Known collectively as Conspiracy, they map territories that are at once well-trodden and uninhabited.
While Rypdal intended to use the group as a platform for reexamining old tunes, it became entity unto itself, yielding the six new cuts (many first performed for the first time here) included on the present disc. Foremost among them is “As If The Ghost… Was Me!?” As enigmatic as its title suggests, it opens with crisp cymbals before Rypdal’s unmistakable crooning snakes into frame. This clarion call to (and of) the creative spirit recalls the fishing lines cast into the waters of If Mountains Could Sing. Storløkken’s washes bring temperance to Rypdal’s fire, while Hallre’s bass dances without ever severing its roots.
The production yields organic details throughout. The buzz of Rypdal’s amp in “What Was I Thinking,” for example, is a bright comfort in an otherwise nocturnal hymn. In the face of such introspection turned into song, there’s hardly a lyric that would fit it. The keyboard swells are like breathing—so natural and automatic that we barely think of it. Not all is mist and gloom, however, as the rock-leaning title track attests. Even so, Rypdal’s painterly sensibilities are no less impeded by the harder canvas.
Hallre absorbs the spotlight of “By His Lonesome,” wherein his flexible tones take low flight, surveying the landscape set before him with careful regard. Although such rounded topographies might be impossible in reality, save for the windswept dunes of faraway deserts, they sculpt a mountain with its own songs to sing. “Baby Beautiful” submerges its heart in a pool of liquid mercury. Cohering groovily halfway through, riding the tails of brushed drums and Hammond organ, it suggests rather than declares. The waves are dynamic but short-lived, content with never knowing another shore. And as “Dawn” crests with bowed tones and gongs, it signals the transformation of immobility into nomadism.
Conspiracy offers much to celebrate and admire for the longtime listener. Licks and atmospheres will go down as easily as favorite comfort foods. What shakes the boughs of expectation a bit, however, is the music’s clarity of purpose, which can only be born of experience. Gone are the 20-minute jams of his Odyssey days. In their place are concise yet dense short stories that parse nothing to convey their characters’ inner worlds, each a wayward blush with which we are privileged to share this leg of the journey.
The late Ian Carr’s Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music long stood as the most complete portrait of its subject, who turns 76 this month. Being a product of 1991, however, the book begged a companion this side of the second millennium. In 2015, German music editor and biographer Wolfgang Sandner answered that call. Five years later, Jarrett’s youngest brother Chris, who lives and teaches in Germany, offered this superbly rendered, expanded and updated translation into English. The result, Keith Jarrett: A Biography, retreads some of the pianist’s formative milestones while stringing through them artful observations, interpretations and connections.
We find ourselves transported back to Jarrett’s upbringing in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where Sandner credits Jarrett’s mother for not putting her son on the pedestal that has separated so many young prodigies from the possibility of a normal childhood. This may be one reason why his genius was able to flourish so organically—untainted by the bane of expectation, he built a career on transcending it.
We sit in the audience during his first solo recital at the age of seven—a mélange of classical and original compositions—waiting for the moment when jazz will enter the soundtrack of his past. We cling to the wall like proverbial flies as, in a mere five-year span, he joins forces with Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Jarrett’s tenure with the latter, who convinces him to join after multiple overtures, goes largely unrecorded and survives only through anecdote. By the time Jarrett parts ways with the Miles, it’s 1971, just two years after the founding of ECM Records by producer Manfred Eicher, with whom Jarrett will forge a lasting relationship. Said relationship yields albums—80 between 1971-2020—that were made to exist, just as they exist to have documented a pianist who “had not really become a soloist—he had actually always been one” (pg. 88).
Jarrett’s “musical syntax” is as recognizable as it is challenging to distill in words. Whether in his traversals of the Great American Songbook with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette or his recording of J.S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier (of which he characteristically remarked, “I was actually refusing more than I was giving”), the mosaic we think we know has revealed tile after unprecedented tile.
All of which serves to validate Sandner’s decision to view jazz through a hypermodern lens, framing its latter-day developments as a recalibration of space among the rubble of the Second World War. And there, in the middle of it all, Jarrett spans the ocean like a bridge between the forward march of Americanism and the traumatic retrogression of the continent. This may be why Sandner concedes in his foreword: “Most of all, though, this music should be heard.” For a musician of Jarrett’s caliber, the best biography remains the discography.
(This article originally appeared in the May 2021 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)
To say that pianist Marilyn Crispell, who turns 74 this month, has charted new territory would be an understatement. It would be just as accurate to say she has redrawn maps of old territory. At her hands, the keyboard leaps like a compass gleeful over its sentience, directing notes with the same force of intention that a seafarer would a ship carrying precious cargo. Whether solo or, as in the two discs presented here, in combination with others, she brings a reverent sense of space honed over decades.
For ConcertOTO, she planetarily aligns with Eddie Prévost (drums) and Harrison Smith (bass clarinet, saxophones) for a traversal of freely rendered terrain. Recorded live in November of 2012 at London’s Café OTO, the album documents most of what went down on that stage. On the one hand, it’s a study in contrasts. “An Exploratory Introduction” opens with just that, reacting to space as much as defining it. The “Finale” balances it with forthright exposition. At many points between them, however, something powerful happens—a magical kind of coalescence that only musicians who truly listen to one another can achieve. And so, whereas “A Meditative Interlude” is a dreamy combination of pianistic icicles, moonlit bass clarinet and hand-swept drums, its quiet moments are no match for the main concert portions flanking it. In those, one will find a veritable catalog of touchpoints linking chains around the ears. In this respect, Crispell is a master collage artist. Because nothing is planned, passages of exhale make the inhalations that much tenser and wilder with possibility. Prévost is a fabulous player, never losing track of the inner thread even when he severs it while Smith treats time as a physical dimension. Their occasional exchanges in absence of piano are just as visceral. An interesting coincidence that the club’s name is homophonous with the Japanese word for “sound,” as this is a gift articulated in that very medium.
Streams pairs Crispell with Yuma Uesaka (saxophones, clarinets), whose compositions constitute the set in its entirety. If ConcertOTO was about being in the moment, then this meeting of minds is about connecting moments as one would a constellation: each piece is minimally indicative of its title and, over time, seems to take on those characteristics as if by default. If anything connects the two projects, it’s a willingness to move wherever the winds of inspiration blow—this, despite the through-written nature of every melody Uesaka offers on the altar of improvisation. Hence the beautifully contradictory atmosphere at play. The title track and “Torrent” are exactly as they should be. The former feels like water that pools and eddies when blocked by fallen branches; the latter like a cannonball dive. Further dichotomies of description abound in the prophetic tinge of “Meditation,” in which a bass clarinet courts the piano’s deepest growls. Elsewhere, dialogues are pushed to extremes, each infused with equal parts catch and release, before funneling into “Ma / Space,” for which the duo welcomes Chatori Shimizu on the shō (Japanese mouth organ) for an added touch of sunlight through branches.
(This article originally appeared in the March 2021 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)
Living as we now do in a world that feels orphaned from its ancestral histories, there’s no more appropriate space to cry out for resurrection than the womb-like expanse of traditional Negro spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.” Saxophonist Archie Shepp turns this melody inside out as salvific blood drips along the keys of Jason Moran’s piano.
Thus, the duo establishes the rhythm of a hymn trapped somewhere between Earth’s crust and the magma churning beneath. If we don’t already feel the words coursing through our ears from the first note, we find them unraveled in Shepp’s own singing voice, of which hints of reed hang in the air like a signature fragrance, as also in Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” and another traditional spiritual, “Go Down Moses.” In both Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn’s “Isfahan” and Moran’s “He Cares,” the listener is greeted by truth while John Coltrane’s “Wise One” unfurls a territory limited only by our imagination to map it. Here, voices of the past hit the open air of the future, only to find they need oxygen masks just to inhale. Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” reminds us that only in the darkest hours can our thoughts churn in an ocean free of pollution—water for its own sake, primed for the vessels of our attempts to make sense of it all.
In light of all this preaching of ebony, ivory and everything in between, it would be unwise to think of the album as a catharsis, for a catharsis implies that we have transcended the bonds that necessitate thoughts of escape. No. We must gaze upon the fetters and chains until they burn after-images into our brains, so that we may never forget what the world would have us deny: many had to die for us to stand here, poised on the cusp of a tide that could just as easily turn in our favor as against it. Though still a long way from home, we strive to see that candlelight in the window telling us: Just one more leg of this journey and the doors of relief will spread their wings to receive you. At least here, we have a feather to hold to our hearts as we press on.
(This review originally appeared in the February 2021 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)
As COVID-19 continues to occupy the foreground of our collective mind, even as its primacy is under threat by the tumult of political schadenfreude, bassist Dezron Douglas and harpist Brandee Younger give us just what we need in this curated selection from their weekly collaborations, live-streamed throughout the pandemic as sonic scripture in a time of foolish doctrines.
The duo dives into the swirling waters of Alice Coltrane’s “Gospel Trane,” throughout which schools of hopeful fish swim in synergy. This is the language of the here and now, wrung dry of all animosity and rehydrated with love, flipping the dynamic of social distancing to reveal a creative intimacy—fierce and inextinguishable—beneath it all.
Subsequent repertoire spans the gamut from Marvin Gaye, The Jackson 5 and Pharoah Sanders to Kate Bush, Sting and The Carpenters. With so much to chew on, we are reminded of how much beauty we’ve lost access to over the past year, not only in terms of sound but also in terms of national sentiment, dialogue, and, above all, listening.
In tracks like John Coltrane’s “Equinox” there is an abiding sense of duality, slipping one hand out of our zeitgeist toward the past and another toward the future. Thus, each instrument brings its own histories to the table, hashing out the lingering oppressions of colonial and plantation mentalities until only indistinguishable molecules are left to dissipate in the air.
Sanders-Leon Thomas’ “The Creator Has A Master Plan” is the heart of this quest, which by the end has only heart left to give. That same blessed hope is outwardly expressed in Joe Raposo’s “Sing.” If God is in the details, then here we are served one heaping plateful after another of them. While like-minded joy overflows its cup in Clifton Davis’ “Never Can Say Goodbye” and “Toilet Paper Romance” (an original with which they ended every show), it bends a knee in the shadow of inward turns like Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” by validating the safety of dreams.
It’s all there in the title, which in everyday usage means an irresistible compulsion yet which in legalese connotes unforeseeable circumstances preventing the fulfillment of a contract. If the latter doesn’t describe the moral loophole of 2020, what does?
(The article originally appeared in the February 2021 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)
The career of musical polymath Ethan Iverson has taken the pianist—and his pen—around the world and then some, in both the geographic and creative senses. Since striking oil in collaboration with bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King as The Bad Plus, Iverson has simultaneously broadened his palette and focused his sound throughout a range of far-thinking endeavors. Among those is his landmark Bud Powell in the 21st Century, a big band project recorded December 2018 at the Umbria Jazz Festival and released at the end of this month on Sunnyside Records. You can continue to track his various trajectories in his web archive, DO THE M@TH.
(Photos: Giancarlo Belfiore)
Tyran Grillo: Who is Ethan Iverson now that he wasn’t 15 years ago?
Ethan Iverson: I always had a plan to keep studying. When The Bad Plus had our surprise breakout success in 2003, I didn’t feel like it was automatically the endpoint. Playing with that band was incredible, but all along I was also thinking about other ways to make a contribution.
One of the reasons I started writing about the music was to let Bad Plus fans know about this great tradition. When you’re the new flavor, it can be seductive to feel like you’ve got it all figured out, but everybody stands on the shoulders of those who preceded them.
TG: When you speak of tradition, do you see that as a monolithic term or is it always evolving?
EI: Someone once said that it’s important for an artist to be able to hold two contradictory thoughts in the mind at the same time. On the one hand, yes, tradition, but on the other hand you have to be in the moment; there’s always the present day, or even looking to build a better future. Both things are true. At the very least, it doesn’t seem to work to say, “I only deal with the tradition.” Neither does it work to say, “I am only new.” Nobody I admire says that only one of those viewpoints is correct.
TG: How does your thinking in that regard connect to Bud Powell?
EI: He’s someone that I keep on learning from. In fact, this project happened two years ago, but just this morning I was practicing and thinking about Bud Powell. He’s an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
There’s room to find inspiration from almost anything. One of my mentors is the choreographer Mark Morris. He goes out all the time to see varied shows. He is always listening to and talking about different forms of music. Despite being schooled in high, conceptual art, you might just as easily find him watching and enjoying the most banal TV show imaginable. He is inflamed by all of it creatively, from high to low. And that, I think, is a pretty good model.
TG: How did the Powell project come about?
EI: It was a commission by the Umbria Jazz Festival, marrying an American quintet with an Italian big band. I was delighted when Carlos Pagnotta and Enzo Capua at Umbria first approached me. Manuele Morbidini, who directed the big band, prepared the musicians so well before I got there that I actually cut a rehearsal. The band was ready. When it came time to look for a label, Sunnyside founder François Zalacain is a bit of an old-school bebopper and really liked the project.
TG: How does the sound you achieved at Umbria differ from what you’ve done before?
EI: Post-Bad Plus, I’ve been doing quite a bit of larger-canvas pieces. I wrote a piano concerto for the American Composers Orchestra. I curated a celebration of Thelonious Monk for his centennial at Duke University. For Mark Morris, I did Pepperland, an evening-length piece connected to The Beatles. There’s been quite a lot of formal composition in the last five years, but Bud Powell in the 21st Century is the first of these projects that’s coming out commercially for everyone to hear.
Speaking of tradition versus being in the present day, when I think of the tribute projects I admire, there’s quite a bit of original composition. Ornette Coleman, even when playing standards, always started with an original melody. So, there’s original composition in this project—the very first track is completely original—but there’s also Powell’s music, which in and of itself is very difficult.
TG: Can you unpack “difficult” for us a little?
EI: With Powell, it’s hard to get all the details exactly right, because they’re quite specific, fast and complicated. I swore to myself that we would get those details right—such that if Bud was there, even if he didn’t like the whole thing, at least he couldn’t look at me and say, “You didn’t even play my melodies right, man.”
TG: How would you describe your relationship to Powell’s music?
EI: I like knowing the text. When The Bad Plus played The Rite of Spring, I played it just like Stravinsky wrote it. If I play Tadd Dameron with [drummer Albert] “Tootie” Heath, I learn Dameron’s original voicings. At one point I transcribed Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” for The Bad Plus. My brain gets really excited by the details. I like to sit there and ask myself what really happened here. I can dive in, think about those details, transcribe and appreciate the subtleties.
There’s also this other side of creativity. I’m confident everything I do has a personal sound, that it sounds like me and part of that sound is wild and woolly. The fantastical or surreal comes in pretty naturally with Bud. At the end of the day, Bud Powell was an avant garde musician. Had the project been dedicated to the music of Dizzy Gillespie or Benny Golson, it might have been harder to find a way in to do something personal. But there’s a surreal glint in Bud Powell’s eye, so that’s a fit for me as well.
TG: What sorts of extra-musical inspirational forces do you find creep into your music?
EI: When I interface with literature, movies, or television, it helps me see that parameters of genre are freeing, not constricting. I like genres. Some people don’t believe in them and want to live their life “genre-free.” I have little interest in that perspective. I’m more like, “What is the genre?” If we know what genre it is, then we can fill the container with the right kind of material. In this project, Bud Powell is within the genre of bebop. I take bebop very seriously as a genre. I do things to it that are not pure bebop, but at the same time, I’m aware of the difference.
Everything “new” is a combination of previous things. What matters is how well you know each element you’re combining. If you’re writing a supernatural detective story, you need to ask yourself how well you know the supernatural genre and how well you know the detective genre. People often know one side more than the other. That’s always been an issue in the arts, but here in the postmodern age of the 21st Century, everything’s a click away. It’s all one big mashup. The question is how well you can control all the aspects you’re dialing in to the final product.
Sometimes, a college music student will say, “I don’t want to be labeled. Don’t even call it jazz; it’s all beyond category.” I get it, but at the same time, any single phrase you can play on an instrument has a heritage, so what lineage are you in? And if you know your lineage, you can accept it or work against it.
TG: Does this influence your selection of musicians as well?
EI: I chose the musicians for this project for specific reasons. There’s a core quintet of Americans, plus the Italian big band. The result is sort of a concerto grosso. My friend Ben Street plays bass. Ben really believes in jazz and plays with so much personality. There aren’t too many bass players you can hear on a record and immediately identify, but Ben is one of those.
Drummer Lewis Nash was suggested by Umbria. I’d heard and admired Lewis my whole life but hadn’t played with him before. For a big band you need a drummer who lays down the law. You can’t necessarily go in with a really idiosyncratic force like Paul Motian or Elvin Jones for a big band. Lewis is a consecrated bebop master who’s played with the Who’s Who, so he was a perfect choice.
I’d admired [trumpeter] Ingrid Jensen for years in the context of Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, so she was always in the back of my mind as someone I’d choose if I ever did a big band project. She’s got connections musically to Kenny Wheeler, who wrote some of the more durable modern big band music. As for tenor saxophonist Dayna Stephens, I heard about him from Ben when in need of a sub for Mark Turner in the Billy Hart Quartet. Dayna is fast and very creative. Both Dayna and Ingrid get a few expansive solos in this project, but they also have solos in which they need to tell a story in just a chorus or two, like the original Powell session with Sonny Rollins, Fats Navarro, Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes.
It was hard for all of us. We all left with a new appreciation for that genre of pure bebop, where everybody says their piece in three minutes. It was a joy to work within those confines.
TG: What surprised you the most when you first got together and played?
EI: I knew Lewis was great, but he struck me as very generous in his playing. He’s a natural accompanist. I’m not so used to that. I’m used to these people who push me around—and I want to be pushed around. But Lewis was like a beautiful jazz couch that you could just sit on and relax. As for Ingrid and Dayna, I knew they were virtuosos, but hearing them play these high-level, burning jazz solos confirmed that I’d gotten the right people. It wasn’t a surprise, exactly, but sometimes you put things together in your mind and it doesn’t always come out that way in reality. But they showed up, they kicked ass and it was great.
TG: What’s next for you?
EI: I expect to play quite a bit more solo piano eventually; that’s been coming along. A current commission is six formal sonatas for six virtuosos, which is going great. More formal composition is certainly in my future. The Billy Hart Quartet continues and we’re live-streaming at Dizzy’s Club to celebrate his 80th birthday. There’s also a wonderful singer named Marcy Harriell who I had a New Year’s Eve gig with last year doing music of Burt Bacharach and it was a huge success. Fortunately, there’s plenty to do. I’m blessed with a pretty sizable list of geniuses who are somehow willing to work with me.
TG: What would you most like to see happen in jazz that hasn’t happened already—or, for that matter, hasn’t happened for a long time and should be revived?
EI: Composition is important. Instrumental virtuosity is important. The blues is really important. Afro-Cuban rhythm is important. Romantic harmony is important. Telling a story is important. When we hear the great jazz records of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, it’s all in a pretty perfect balance. After John Coltrane passed away, we’ve had 50 years of great music, but it’s seldom been the whole package. I believe in inclusivity. There are so many elements of music and if you can get a passing grade in many of them, you can keep moving it forward. When I talk about Burt Bacharach in the same breath as Bud Powell, I don’t see them that differently in the sense that both are the very highest level composers within their respective genres.
(This interview originally appeared in the January 2021 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 