Listening to Bob James play solo piano is like seeing a smartly written, well-acted stage play: full of dynamics and intrigue, with the spaces and reactions almost as powerful as the words. Dancing on the Water is filled with these emotive meditations in the form of solo piano pieces and well-matched duets. James manipulates time and dynamics to create specific moods on pieces ranging from the nimble and sly “Bogie’s Boogie” to the minimalist, bittersweet “Modesty.” He’s not afraid to let the spaces ring out along with the notes, lending a haunted melancholy to “The Green Hour,” for example. But the pairings here prove equally affecting, as James sparkles in high-register, running give-and-take with guitarist Chuck Loeb on “Dancing on the Water,” and paints a four-handed picture with Keiko Matsui on “Altair & Vega,” pitting his broad, melodic sweeps against her high register, stiff-fingered melody-then trading places. The duo makes one piano sound like an orchestra. Some of the album’s most poignant moments are in duets with bassist Dave Holland, including a beautiful, world-weary reminiscence on “Last Night When We Were Young,” which finds Holland’s padded bass patter falling over James’ piano doodles like a soft shadow.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading

Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading

Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time