Eighty-Eights
January/February 2009 By Thomas Conrad
Moments Notice
Chilly Bin
In person, in bands like Charlie Haden’s Quartet West, Alan Broadbent can be a startling piano player, capable of impulsive outbursts. He makes damn fine piano trio records, one after the other, but they only hint at his live persona. They are more conservative...
January/February 2009 By Thomas Conrad
The Blues and the Abstract Truth, Take 2
Resonance Records
In the introduction to his book Weather Bird, Gary Giddins observes, “Interpretation, the lifeblood of classical music, is downgraded to imitation in jazz, beyond occasional attempts at orchestral repertory.” Bill Cunliffe dares to challenge this principle...
January/February 2009 By Thomas Conrad
For Dewey
Sunnyside
Peter Delano was a teenage prodigy when he made a brief splash in the mid-1990s with two albums on Verve and PolyGram. Then he disappeared. What was to have been his third album was recorded in 1996 but never released until now. For Dewey is so good that...
January/February 2009 By Thomas Conrad
View So Tender: Wonder Revisited, Volume One
Capri Records
As time marches inexorably on, there are fewer people who think “Stella By Starlight” is a standard, and more for whom standards are songs by, say, Stevie Wonder. Jazz musicians, even young ones, have been slow to pick up on this demographic reality. Not...
January/February 2009 By Thomas Conrad
Just Me, Just You
Arbors Records
This is an unspectacular, unassuming, relatively quiet, likable solo piano recital. Larry Ham’s approach is so measured and orderly that you might think you are hearing standards like “My Romance” and “If I Should Lose You” and “I Can’t Get Started” virtually...
January/February 2009 By Thomas Conrad
Cover Up!
Playing
Here pianist George Kahn presents jazz versions of “songs [he] grew up with,” in clean, full-bodied arrangements for his trio (bassist Brian Bromberg, drummer Alex Acuña) and rotating guests (tenor saxophonist Justo Almario, trumpeter John Fumo, guitarist...
January/February 2009 By Thomas Conrad
Live at the Jazz Standard
IPO
Roger Kellaway has the kind of monumental piano technique for which it is hard to find analogues. A modernized version of Dick Hyman is perhaps one. Like Hyman, Kellaway can knock you flat and run you over while sounding like he has the gas pedal halfway...
January/February 2009 By Thomas Conrad
FiveLive
Savant
Even though the best-sounding jazz recordings are made in studios, most people’s favorite jazz albums were made live in clubs or concert halls. Jazz recorded in a studio is to jazz recorded live as animals in a zoo are to animals in their wild natural habitat...
January/February 2009 By Thomas Conrad
Remembering the Way Home
Origin Records
This album came about because Steve Million (a five-night-a-week working jazz pianist in Chicago) began studying classical music again. He says that the experience took him back to an early version of his playing, before he had committed himself to jazz...
January/February 2009 By Thomas Conrad
You Go to My Head
Blue Jack
There are two important jazz pianists who died in the new millennium who are in danger of being forgotten: Frank Hewitt and Sal Mosca. Both left behind minimal discographies that prove they were major original stylists. Mosca studied with Lennie Tristano...
