Jazz

Trio Beyond: Saudades (ECM 1972/73)

| Tyran Grillo

Saudades

Trio Beyond
Saudades

John Scofield guitars
Larry Goldings Hammond organ, electric piano, sampler
Jack DeJohnette drums
Recorded live November 21, 2004 at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Engineer: Patrick Murray
Edited and mastered at Rainbow Studio by Jan Erik Kongshaug and Manfred Eicher

If you can’t stand the heat, then run—don’t walk—into the kitchen. That seems to be the message of Saudades, the unrelenting album by Trio Beyond. The title connotes a longing or melancholy in Portuguese. Yet the music bursts with conviction left and right, so the only thing one might long for is another two discs’ worth. At the heart of Beyond is Jack DeJohnette. His talents have orbited the sun more times than anyone can count, and here he initiates a project in honor of the great Tony Williams, who stepped off the Miles Davis platform in the late sixties to focus on his Lifetime trio, the guitar/organ/drums format of which is preserved here. Even in the absence of this information, the music clearly serves a time when fusion was not yet a sullied word, when its crosspollinations bore fragrances as fresh as spring. In the album’s official press release, DeJohnette humbly notes Williams’s “visionary concept of time and space,” but we can, of course, give similar credit to DeJohnette, a drummer without whom the landscape of modern American music would be much flatter. Fleshing out this homage are two phenomenal musicians in their own right, each with one eye trained to and the other fro. Keyboardist Larry Goldings is magic at the Hammond organ, often playing the parts of bassist and lead with two remarkably independent hands, while guitarist John Scofield fights fire with fire in his blistering yet welcoming style.

Indeed, once Joe Henderson’s “If” lights the match, there’s no turning away from the ensuing glow. Like this set (recorded live at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in late 2004) as a whole, it engages at both the level of performance and through its call to the fortunate listener by way of carefully chosen tunes. Inspiring and inspired, Goldings parallels Scofield’s flame trail like the DeLorean’s tire tracks in Back to the Future. The organist further offers up his original “As One,” which paves a spacy runway into the full (if brief) melodic shout of Larry Young’s “Allah Be Praised.” The title track, first of two cuts by the trio as a unit, proves a fast-moving vehicle for Scofield, who leads the way with staggering variety of tone and control, all the while getting jiggy with increasingly wild electronic enhancements. “Love In Blues,” also by the trio, is no less lovingly crafted, and finds Scofield holding his intense own over a mosaic of rhythms and voices, and finding intensity on his journey toward calm.

Williams’s spirit is apparent throughout, but gets his most overt props as composer of “Pee Wee” and “Emergency.” The first is a relatively tender chunk of goodness in which Scofield plays downright saxophonically, sustaining and clipping notes in kind. The boisterous second is rich as cream sauce—Scofield bringing the rise and Goldings the fall—and scales the cliffs of a spellbinding improvisational mountain. John McLaughlin’s “Spectrum,” given here a 16-minute treatment, is another thoroughly awesome adventure. The nature of DeJohnette and Scofield’s crosstalk, virtuosic yet free to bask in the groove, is a veritable master class of how musicians should listen to each other.

Our requisite ballad comes in the form of “I Fall In Love Too Easily,” by Broadway legend Jule Styne, in which Goldings treads a smooth and sultry line. It’s a soft reprieve after the sharp focus of Miles Davis’s “Seven Steps To Heaven.” DeJohnette steps up his game in a tune filled with propulsive depth and turn-on-a-dime changes, Scofield and Goldings trading expert handoffs all the while. Of course, Miles goes down all the better with a Coltrane chaser. The latter’s “Big Nick” gives more prime time for Goldings, who slingshots past the moon and back. Yet it’s DeJohnette’s perfect timekeeping that lingers longest on the palette, tasting of vibrant life and love for the moment.

Trio Beyond

Tord Gustavsen Trio: Being There (ECM 2017)

| Tyran Grillo

Being There

Tord Gustavsen Trio
Being There

Tord Gustavsen piano
Harald Johnsen double-bass
Jarle Vespestad drums
Recorded December 2006 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

There’s no mistaking a Tord Gustavsen Trio record. Intimate in measure yet profound in scope, each builds on the last like another level of a pyramid built from the capstone down. In this manner Being There follows Changing Places and The Ground as the last of a trilogy, though it is by no means the be all and end all of the trio’s capabilities. There’s so much to admire on Being There that one could see its vessel off contentedly were it never to return to shore. If the album’s title sounds familiar, that’s because it comes by way of a tune off The Ground. But this baker’s dozen casts two forward glances for every backward, always moving toward the goal of utter respect: for the notecraft, for the sound, for the moment.

Those who subscribe to the stereotype of contemplative Nordic jazz will be both rewarded and pleasantly surprised. On the one hand, there is “At Home,” which begins the album, as it has often done for the trio’s stage sets, with honed lyric intensity and lullaby charm. The brushed ruminations of Gustavsen’s bandmates—bassist Harald Johnsen and drummer Jarle Vespestad—buoy the pianist on inky currents. The downtempo mood holds true for much of the album’s hymnody, taking fullest (which is to say, spacious) form in the anthemic “Still There” and the veiled “Vesper.” With barest touch but also viable emotional weight, the trio moves further through the balladic changes of “Around You” and “Draw Near” with an embrace so warm that three become one. Each is a profession of faith in love through love of faith, drifting a hair’s breadth from the divine in “Sani.” This duet for piano and drums describes a blown feather. Free of wing in its own dream of flight, it wanders along a quiet storm’s path. These slower songs take full advantage of the acoustics, both live and post-processed, and build to a density of expression that nevertheless allows room to breathe. It’s as if the trio explores knots in wood, each a galaxy waiting to be sung. In them Gustavsen paints flowering worlds with every keystroke, as he does especially in the melodic orbit of “Karmosin” (penned by Johnsen and the only track not by the pianist) and the solo improvised “Interlude.” The latter is the modal hip at which the album flexes. Poetry flows from its deference, clear as sunlight on a river, across a brittle page, which is then folded, sealed, and held above a burning candle.

While much of the album is suited to closed-eye listening, there are a few breaks in the waves. Between the swooping wingspan of “Vicar Street” and the uplifting “Where We Went,” there is “Blessed Feet,” a masterful and obvious nod to Keith Jarrett. This swinging number proves Gustavsen a magician at the keyboard, by which he, ever the melodic herdsman, corrals every note in formation. Even the lethargic clouds of “Cocoon” abide by structural principles, at once conscious and free.

Yet it is on the waters of “Wide Open” that the trio finds what it’s been looking for: a step into the future, as yet unknown, with eyes fixed on the horizon. Where the album opened at home, here it ends with a homecoming. And it is in your home that this music belongs, right there on the shelf next to your most prized discs.

Steve Tibbetts: Natural Causes (ECM 1951)

| Tyran Grillo

Natural Causes

Steve Tibbetts
Natural Causes

Steve Tibbetts guitars, piano, kalimba, bouzouki
Marc Anderson percussion, steel drum, gongs
Recorded 2008 in St. Paul
Engineer: Steve Tibbetts
An ECM Production

If ever there was a case for quality over quantity, Steve Tibbetts is it. A full eight years after A Man About A Horse, the Minnesotan guitarist returns with his most intimate statement yet. Alongside percussionist Marc Anderson, collaborator of over three decades, Tibbetts crafts a geography so inward-looking that it becomes a parallel world. Tibbetts originally flirted with the idea of releasing Natural Causes as one single track. Were such the case, listeners would feel no less aware of its science. Either way, its 13 tracks are not variations on a theme, even if they do play with the theme of variation. He calls them, rather, “complex little cathedrals,” building them as he does stone by stone, if not string by string. Indeed, his trusted 12-string guitar is possessed of something divine, its frets pared down to almost nothing over years of playing, so that fingers glide freely.

In a rare turn, Natural Causes is nearly all acoustic and accordingly finds Tibbetts playing piano, kalimba, and bouzouki to flesh out the palette. In addition to these, he employs a midi interface, by which he triggers samples of gongs and metal-key instruments collected during his travels. Of these, “Lakshmivana” is the fullest integration of plugged and unplugged. Told in the language of prayer—i.e., of human artifice embracing sacrality—it is an astonishing meditation that is only deepened by the story told in “Chandogra.” Here the periphery is barely noticeable. Instruments peek from the shadows, seemingly incidental, and fade at the instant of regard.

From the back-porch motif that introduces “Sitavana,” the album’s gateway, and through the burgeoning field that follows toward the solo “Threnody,” it’s obvious that Tibbetts’s attention to detail has grown like the preceding metaphor. His playing, mellifluous as ever, establishes global reach with tracks like “Padre-Yaga,” in which Anderson’s hand drumming leaves trails on the beaten plains. It develops, as does the album as a whole, in distinct cells, every pause linking the body to the less tangible impulses that make fingers ache for the fretboard.

There is an almost keening quality to Tibbetts’s portamento. “Attahasa,” for one, is a tree shedding spores. For another, “Sangchen Rolpa” wavers on the precipice of some great abyss. Across that expanse Tibbetts extends brief, tender bridges, paved with inner fire. Between them, the album’s groundswells reveal texture and breadth.

Although this is Tibbetts’s most inward-looking record, it is also his farthest reaching. His art is as honest as the landscapes that inform it, changing form and color as he moves from one riverbank to the next. Whether you choose to walk with him or listen upon him from above, just know there is a home for you here to which you may always return.

Stefano Battaglia: Raccolto (ECM 1933/34)

| Tyran Grillo

Raccolto

Stefano Battaglia
Raccolto

Stefano Battaglia piano
Giovanni Maier double bass
Michele Rabbia percussion
Dominique Pifarély violin
Recorded September/December 2003, Artesuono Recording Studio, Udine
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Album produced by ECM

Raccolto is one of ECM’s most fascinating productions, though for some listeners surely also one of its most challenging. Significant enough for welcoming Italian pianist Stefano Battaglia to the label, it may be equally so for introducing percussionist Michele Rabbia, whose contributions are nothing short of revelatory throughout this double-disc effort. Battaglia and Rabbia are the common links to the album’s back-to-back trios, the first with bassist Giovanni Maier (better known as Triosonic) and the second with violinist Dominique Pifarély (a.k.a. Atem).

The standard jazz trio here is anything but in execution, as evidenced by the title track (meaning “harvest”), which opens the first session with Battaglia’s careful footsteps, joined by others in a dimly lit hall of mirrors. Striking here, aside from the rhythm section’s awakenings, are the Bach-like changes at play. It is as if the ensuing theatre of abstractions issues from the heart of history. With names like “All is language” and “In front of the fourth door,” it’s easy to get lost in each track’s spell, under which certainties become uncertainties and uncertainties become mantras. Motives seek rupture but find only a scrim of caution between them and full-on embodiment. And so, they dream of that embodiment instead, and this is the sound to which we are made privy, especially in the brief, and sometimes astonishing, culminations scattered throughout. Rhythms are thus implied more than they are directed, caught in virtuosic blips from the man at the keys or from Rabbia’s dustings of shrapnel and time. In these examples, as in “Our circular song,” the percussionist reveals worlds unto himself.

Not to be left behind, Maier grabs a lion’s share of spotlight in “L’osservanza,” which concludes the set in a vehicle of tender, lyric flashes. It’s a billowing weave that cups wind as a flower would sunlight. The bassist’s soloing in “Triangolazioni” adds depth to whispers and occupies a poetic center. He further inspires Battaglia to crystalline segues of call and response. “Coro,” then, can be nothing but a maze. Rabbia adds to it insect wings, hushes of children and slumber, of hiding and protection, so that Battaglia’s chording can find consummation only within. Hence, too, the two tracks marked “Triosonic,” in which the piano gives up its ghosts so that others might live.

Disc 2 swaps Maier for Pifarély for a dozen classically inflected improvisations built around abstract themes. As the go-to violinist of Louis Sclavis, Pifarély should surprise no one familiar with the violinist’s selective chamber appearances, each a window into another. His slippery playing recalls Luciano Berio’s Voci, especially in the folkish lilt of “Lys” and in the two “Cantos.” The latter feature prepared piano for a glassine effect, while Rabbia dips into more metallic streams of consciousness. And then, there is the obvious homage, “Recitativo in memoria di Luciano Berio,” which finds the trio mining the Italian landscape for ideas.

Surrounding moods range from frenetic to elegiac, achieving soul-digging brilliance in “Riconoscenza,” “Velario de marzo,” and “Pourquoi?” The last is tempered by Pifarély’s gravelly soothsaying in a showing of perfect restraint. Through various geometric configurations, the three musicians follow string paths as blood navigates veins until they reach the resonant frequency of “…Dulci declinant lumina somno…” It is the unforeseen view underlying everything, a vista within a vista, fragile as a moth’s wing.

It’s only appropriate that Battaglia should have found a home at ECM. The pianist cites Paul Bley’s Open, To Love and Keith Jarrett’s Facing You as defining encounters that pushed his classical rigor into dovetailed paths of improvisatory possibility. His Raccolto is one stubborn staircase, indeed, but well worth the climb. A debut to remember.

FLY: Sky & Country (ECM 2067)

| Tyran Grillo

Sky & Country

FLY
Sky & Country

Mark Turner tenor and soprano saxophones
Larry Grenadier double-bass
Jeff Ballard drums
Recorded February/June 2008 at Avatar Studios, New York
Engineer: James A. Farber
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The intimately democratic trio known as FLY encompasses the talents of saxophonist Mark Turner, bassist Larry Grenadier, and drummer Jeff Ballard. The expressiveness of each member takes flight not only in the playing, but also in the composing, and for a spell tilts ECM’s Europe-leaning scale Stateside.

Ballard pens three tunes, including opener “Lady B,” which sets the dial to a pervading, if understated, hipness. The vibe is at once robust and airy, equalizing Grenadier’s superb melodic sensibilities with Turner’s go-with-the-flow changes and Ballard’s spinning color wheel. Here, as throughout, the trio sways between dance and chance, taking its time to develop a slippery groove and overlapping just so before pulling its improvisational ripcord. Ballard also contributes the laddered title track and “Perla Morena,” in which the groove continues at the level of a subconscious whisper. The latter tune throws a spotlight on Turner, who braids tasteful, virtuosic arpeggios in his soloing.

From Grenadier we get two tunes. The ballad “CJ” is a turning point in the album. The composer is, rightly enough, its heart and soul, and against thought-splashes of cymbals offers his monologue as a open meditation on the question of love. “Transfigured” is a sparser dialogue between Turner and Ballard in which Grenadier fleshes the skeletal spaces between with arco tissue. These freer gestures grab some traction as the rhythm section blends into song, only to snap out of its self-induced spell with fibrillating shine.

Turner’s pen yields four tunes, ranging from buoyant chromatism (“Elena Berenjena”) to slick fantasy (“Anandananda”). Yet it’s his “Super Sister,” which closes the album with 11 minutes of flattering ruminations, that shows the band at its finest. Here arises the full instrumental palette. Between Ballard’s murmuring poetics, and the swinging DNA helixes spun by Turner and Grenadier, there’s so much to admire and tease apart that you may just want to put the album on again the moment it ends.

Encore!

(To hear samples of Sky & Country, click here.)

Eberhard Weber: Stages Of A Long Journey (ECM 1920)

| Tyran Grillo

Stages Of A Long Journey

Eberhard Weber
Stages Of A Long Journey

Gary Burton vibraphone
Jan Garbarek soprano and tenor saxophones
Rainer Brüninghaus piano
Eberhard Weber bass
Marilyn Mazur percussion
SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra
Roland Kluttig conductor
Recorded in concert, March 23/24, 2005, Theaterhaus Stuttgart
Engineer: Michael Sandner
Concert produced by Martin Mühleis

Stages Of A Long Journey documents the best moments of two March 2005 concerts in Stuttgart celebrating the 65th birthday of Eberhard Weber. The bassist has, of course, been a mainstay at ECM, where his comparable talents as composer and arranger have found room to flourish since his breakthrough “Colours” discs of the seventies. This is his first live record for the label he calls home.

The album’s roster represents decades of inter- and intra-musical friendship, and dots a compass of profound collaboration. Saxophonist Jan Garbarek, in whose self-named group Weber has performed alongside many of the other featured musicians, returns the favor by casting his nets back to tunes in which he was never originally involved. The elliptical nature of it all brews fresh ideas and colorations, especially in the duo track “Seven Movements,” in which Garbarek’s soprano rides the ember-glow of Weber’s arpeggios like a bird on the wing.

Another evocative duo comes in the form of “Yesterdays.” The 1930s show tune pairs Weber with surprise guest (and oldest ally of them all) Wolfgang Dauner, he of the elusive Output, at the keys. In this conversation, one encounters the joy with which the bassist emotes. This makes it the most nostalgic portion of the program, which is perhaps why Weber foregoes his trusty electrobass and, in a rare turn, goes unplugged for a spell on the standard upright.

Another wizard of the keyboard, Rainer Brüninghaus, is a necessary presence for such a performance. Having contributed atmospheric details to so many of Weber’s tapestries, he lifts the classic “The Colours of Chloë”—which opens the five-part Birthday Suite—to new heights. The combination of bass and piano here reaches across and beyond the ensemble’s stretched canvas. Brüninghaus furthers the suite with his original “Piano transition,” as does percussionist Marilyn Mazur in her “Percussion transition,” both satellites orbiting Weber’s dreamlike “Maurizius” in telepathic gravitation. Moreover, Vibraphonist Gary Burton makes his mark on “Yellow Fields,” the suite’s final offering. Here, too, is where the final pieces of the puzzle work most intuitively, as the 90-piece Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Roland Kluttig, transitions across newly fertilized surroundings with its unassuming blend.

Because there has always been something of an orchestral heart beating in Weber’s music, one should not put too much stock into its actualization herein. This is duly apparent in “Silent Feet.” As the album’s opener, it is as likely an introduction as any for those hearing these pieces for the first time, but on its waves bobs the unblemished torch of interpretation that Weber has carried all these years, reaching full conflagration in a new take on Carla Bley’s “Syndrome.” This pet tune takes listeners into exciting directions as Weber navigates a shifting mosaic—sometimes in triplicate, sometimes duplicate—with controlled heat.Percussionist Reto Weber and beatboxing phenomenon Nino G join in the fun for “Hang Around” (a wordplay on Reto’s hang drum), much to the audience’s obvious delight. It is a playful interlude, but an equally conducive facet of the bassist’s prism, as is “The Last Stage Of A Long Journey,” a veritable origami figure of wind, land, and, above all, light.

Eberhard Weber’s music is a process of translation. Through it all, his bass is a visceral, thrumming magnet that seems to emerge from the very earth even while burrowing into it. His musical language is interlocking yet contrapuntal. Like an open book, its pages contain infinite wisdom but come together at the spine. All the more appropriate that Weber should end solo with “Air.” A summation but also a beginning, it is a badge of honor as only he can wear it.

Miroslav Vitous: Universal Syncopations II (ECM 2013)

| Tyran Grillo

Universal Syncopations II

Miroslav Vitous
Universal Syncopations II

Bob Mintzer tenor saxophone, bass clarinet
Gary Campbell soprano and tenor saxophones
Bob Malach tenor saxophone
Randy Brecker trumpet
Daniele di Bonaventura bandoneón
Vesna Vasko-Caceres voice
Gerald Cleaver drums
Adam Nussbaum drums
Miroslav Vitous double-bass
Recorded November 2004-April 2005 at Universal Syncopation Studios (Italy) by Miroslav Vitous
Assistant mixing engineer: Andrea Luciano
Produced by Miroslav Vitous

Bassist-composer Miroslav Vitous dove headlong into Universal Syncopations II after the success of its predecessor, but required a handful of years to see the light of day on disc. Fronting (or is he centering?) a newly fashioned ensemble, Vitous exercises full creative control over the project, interlacing ribbons from his unique library of orchestral and choral samples into an already thick weave of live players.

The end effect takes some getting used to in the beginning, if only because it is so innovative and unusual. “Opera” opens with the din of a concert hall crowd that gathers like magnified sunlight into an awakening chant. From this emerges Vitous’s pliant and jovial bassing, which darts through its motivic surroundings like a squirrel from branch to branch. Drummer Adam Nussbaum keeps the core alive alongside hip tenor action from Bob Mintzer, while the muted trumpet of Randy Brecker crowns the mountain like a setting sun. There is chatter and laughter, a true feeling of context in an almost ritualistic tapestry of sounds.This is but the preamble for what the album has in store, and with “Breakthrough” shuffles the musicians a bit for some trend-setting flavor. Echoes of the Doctor Who theme arise in the soprano saxophone of Gary Campbell, who takes the melodic lead but leaves plenty of room for drummer Gerald Cleaver to squeegee the windows with his grist. Vitous, too, is busy, if humbly backgrounded in the denser portions.

Because of the many acoustic interests at play, certain portions of the album are more successful than others. It’s not that the mélange is unviable, but simply that the musicianship is so raw and immediate that the relatively processed interjections of strings, brass, and choir are by and large unnecessary, intriguing though they are. Thus, where such snippets feel extraneous to the crosstalk between Vitous and Campbell’s tenor in “The Prayer,” in “Gmoong” and “Universal Evolution” the combination clicks into place.

What this album may lack in consistency of arrangement it makes up for in spades with the musicianship, especially that of Cleaver. The drummer might as well be the “Solar Giant” to which the same track refers. Whether keeping the pulse through firewalls of horns or walking in the splash-steps of “Mediterranean Love,” he adapts with an intuitive, chameleonic energy, ever the epitome of balance between fore- and background, a direct link to what the album is trying to spiritually express.

“Moment” ends on a quiet storm, Vitous rolling the bass like a coin across a gunslinger’s fingers. Voices speak as if walking and dissolve at the touch of a single timpani hit. In its wake, one may be at odds trying to draw a connection between the two Syncopations. Which is precisely, it seems, the point: change is evolution. Surely, the art of this sequel deepens with each listening experience into something beyond itself, for experience is what it’s all about.

Wolfert Brederode Quartet: Currents (ECM 2004)

| Tyran Grillo

Currents

Wolfert Brederode Quartet
Currents

Wolfert Brederode piano
Claudio Puntin clarinets
Mats Eilertsen double-bass
Samuel Rohrer drums
Recorded June 2006 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Dutch pianist Wolfert Brederode, previously heard buoying the voice of Susanne Abbuehl on April and Compass, makes his ECM leader debut, fronting a quartet of lyric integrity. Brederode takes the standard piano trio, fleshed here by bassist Mats Eilertsen and drummer Samuel Rohrer, and adds to it the clarinet of Claudio Puntin for a sound that is distinctly “chamber jazz” yet something more. That something more comes out through the plurivocity of Brederode’s compositions, which in the hands of these capable sound-smiths take to their own measures of flight from note one.

Indeed, it’s hard not to be won over after the first few moments of “Common Fields.” As the album’s introduction, its work is twofold. First, it establishes a taste of things to come. Second, and equally important, it testifies to producer Manfred Eicher’s ear for sequencing. With its piano arpeggios, curling like the lips of a foamy tide, it paints a geography as vivid as sunset. The clarinet wanders onto land like an abandoned ship whose ghosts drag the heavy chains of memory as their bounty. Eilertsen marks their footprints in the sand, claiming the island as their own. As the rhythm section becomes more apparent, the diction becomes starker, more animated, turning pathos into chaos and back again. Along with the dazzling poetics of “Scarabee” and “Ebb,” this track evokes atmospheres not unlike ECM’s unforgettable The Sea. Fans of the same are sure to feel right at home, while also expanding their purview toward this quartet’s landscaping.

Other points of confluence crop up along the way. “Empty Room,” for example, recalls the opening tune (“Nicolette”) of Kenny Wheeler’s Angel Song, while Abbuehl’s “As You July Me” (the album’s only tune not by Brederode and an ode to E. E. Cummings) draws from the pianist’s longstanding alliance with the Swiss jazz vocalist and proceeds accordingly with lush pacing. Much of the album’s remainder traces bridges of harmony over nocturnal divides. Some tracks (“High & Low”) glisten like rain-slicked streets; others (“Desiderata”) adopt inward-looking posture, taking in the clarinet’s sunrays for denser foliage and deeper roots. The feeling moves from water to land, emerging in “Soil” like an animal from hibernation amid splashes of light and shadow, and spouting elliptical wisdom in “Frost Flower.” The latter is an album highlight, a snowflake turned miracle in the cold, cold wind.

The tenderest moments come in the form of “With Them,” an interlude for piano and clarinet, and the concluding “Barcelona,” a strangely twisted path through rarely trodden alleyways. The pianism seeks what it finds: a storehouse of experience waiting to be written, played, and heard.

Although Brederode and his companions never stray too far afield, there is genuine freedom working beneath all the precision. It’s the best of both worlds, and makes worlds of both.

Stefano Bollani: Piano Solo (ECM 1964)

| Tyran Grillo

Piano Solo

Piano Solo

Stefano Bollani piano
Recorded August 2005, Auditorio Radio Svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Assistant: Lara Persia
Mixed at Artesuono Studio, Udine
Produced by Manfred Eicher

After a fruitful apprenticeship under the wing of Enrico Rava (cf. Easy Living), pianist Stefano Bollani goes solo for ECM in a set of 16 vignettes as virtuosic as they are varied. From this alliterative description alone, one might think the simply titled Piano Solo to be nothing more than a potpourri of stylistic experiments. It is, rather, the wonderful, and sometimes wondrous, curriculum vitae of an artist who comes into his own on this record, even as he surpasses his own expectations.

Much of the marrow in the bones of Piano Solo draws nourishment from Bollani’s unprepared improvisations. Of these we are treated to four examples, the first of which breaks open the geode of his craft and renders every architectural facet therein. The remaining three, each more focused than the last, proceed from convolution to clarity, venturing along the way into the piano cavity before migrating with childlike energy to the keyboard proper. Notes sing their songs like storybook characters, flipping by like so many turned pages.

From Bollani’s own pen come three loosely drawn pieces: “Promenade,” “Buzzillare,” and “Sarcasmi.” Each lays another edge piece of the pianist’s puzzle, showing depth of range in its equal fascination with wistful autumns and humid summers. They are further notable for the humility of their virtuosity, and for the genuine attraction of their whimsy. Even his “On a Theme by Sergey Prokofiev,” tangential at best to the Andante of the Russian composer’s First Piano Concerto, takes on a special persuasion.

As alluring as these windows are, none are so Palladian as Bollani’s interpretations of standards and popular tunes. The reigning highlights thereof—namely, “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans” and Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”—come straight out of Dixieland. Of them Bollani makes a cocktail that tastes at once fresh and nostalgic, with just the right twist for balance. “On The Street Where You Live” is another contender for album zenith, its descriptive beauties outmatched only by the adaptive flair of the one making them audible. Indeed, Bollani is just as comfortable waxing the prosody of “Antonia” (by the Milanese pianist and composer Antonio Zambrini) or the timeworn balladry of “For All We Know” as he is deconstructing the tango of “A Media Luz” or spouting golden heat across the dreamscape of “Como Fue.” In all of these, a marked separation between the left (sea) and right (sky) hands prevails, separating even the densest chords into their constituent elements. All of which funnels into the benediction of Brian Wilson’s “Don’t Talk,” by which the program impresses its seal with a gentle good night.

Not many pianists can be said, with any faith, to approach the improvisatory prowess of Keith Jarrett, but one need listen no further than Bollani, who in his arcing way creates a keystone for every flourish, so that everything holds true. For my money, he most closely fits the bill for his weighing of space and time, for a downright religious respect for the almighty melody, and for the breadth of his sounding. His distinction can be found in the robustness of his textures, which no matter how tightly woven always let the wind through.