An Ode to Jazz Piano

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The Keystone Korner was a legendary jazz club in San Francisco between 1972 and 1983, a place where Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Art Blakey and Dexter Gordon recorded important live albums. Owner Todd Barkan reopened the club in Baltimore in 2019, and it has become a second home for me, a place where I can hear the finest jazz pianists in the world—often the best pianists in any genre.

On Father’s Day last month, for example, I heard pianist Orrin Evans demonstrate how thrilling jazz can be when it refuses to abandon tunes but also refuses to be constrained by them. At times, the pleasures of melody, harmony and groove were unmistakable in Evans’ muscular blues-gospel phrasing, in Gary Thomas’s continuous, unpunctuated tenor-sax lines, and in Sean Jones’ highly punctuated trumpet phrases. At other times, the mere shadow of the song could be detected in the long, cathartic solos by these men or by the rhythm section of bassist Robert Hurts and drummer Marvin “Smitty” Smith—but the song was there nonetheless.

In either case, it was the forward momentum and emotional commitment that kept the audience with the band wherever it ventured. Most of the repertoire were Evans’ compositions from his new album, The Red Door, a recording that features four-fifths of the ensemble at the Keystone (Jones replaced Nicholas Payton). This continuity from studio to stage is invaluable and all too rare in the modern musical economy, where top musicians are often too busy and too expensive to bring on the road. To have a band like this, where every member is a bandleader in his own right, makes every sacrifice worthwhile.

Another piano-led all-star line-up visited the Keystone Korner in Baltimore’s Harbor East this past spring. Renee Rosnes was joined by vibraphonist Steve Nelson, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Lewis Nash. They mostly played jazz standards, but they handled them so skillfully, so distinctively that they all seemed new again. Rosnes blended classical piano chops with confident improvisation, whether coaxing romance from a ballad or swagger from a swing tune. This was most obvious on Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz,” which Rosnes developed from a relaxed ballad into a skittering duet with fellow keyboardist Nelson.

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Rosnes is also the leader on one of this year’s best jazz albums, In Real Time by the all-female sextet Artemis. Since its 2020 debut album, the group’s two reed players have been replaced by tenor saxophonist Nicole Glover and alto saxophonist Alexa Tarantino, but the group’s two greatest strengths—Rosnes’ smart, chamber-jazz arrangements and Allison Miller’s powerhouse drumming—remain. The six originals and two reinvented standards suggest that Artemis is more than a novelty or side project; it can be one of the major bands in jazz.

Leo Genovese, who came to the Keystone last year as the impressive young pianist in the Joe Lovano Quartet, has a new album as the leader of a trio. Estrellero features four compositions by Genovese and five by bassist Demian Cabaud, and together with drummer Marcos Cavaleiro they demonstrate the democratic possibilities of the piano-trio format. Yes, Genovese creates a pell-mell momentum of sprinting right-hand runs and tumbling chords, but Cabaud and Cavaleiro are never restricted to time-keeping duties but generate forward-pushing explorations of their own.

That all this traffic flows smoothly without any car wrecks is due to the simpatico relationship between Genovese and Cabaud, two Argentine musicians who met at Boston’s Berklee School of Music 20 years ago and who have collaborated ever since. Portugal’s Cavaleiro is absorbed into this collective music-making, and the result is one more example of how modern jazz has benefitted from its increasing internationalization.

Genovese also shows up on Telmo’s Tune, the new album by the Guillermo Klein Quinteto. Klein, also Argentinian, is playing acoustic piano on his nine compositions, while Genovese offers contrast on a Fender Rhodes. This format allows Klein to build dense harmonies with 20 fingers on the keyboards, while allowing the listener to hear the difference between the acoustic and synthesized parts. Klein is best known for his big band, Los Gauchos, but here he transfers his signature blend of Latin rhythms and European harmony to the spontaneity of a small combo.

It works splendidly. The chiming sounds of Genovese’s Rhodes and the bleeping of his synth contrast with the crispness of Klein’s piano without preventing an ultimate merger of the two. Whether it’s the drifting reverie of “Burrito Mirror” or the wind-up music box of “Push Me Not,” the themes are memorable, even as the rhythms seem to slip and slide under the listener’s feet.

The marriage of acoustic and electronic music is less successful on Live at the Village Vanguard by Kris Davis’ Diatom Ribbons. Davis is a gifted keyboardist, and this is an admirably ambitious album. But ambition implies risk, and risk implies a real possibility of failure, and there are as many failures as triumphs here. Davis switches back between standard piano, prepared piano and synthesizer, but the differing sonorities can’t disguise the paucity of thematic material.

DJ Val Jeanty scatters electronic textures and spoken-word samples throughout the 100 minutes of music spread over two CD without much connection to the greater soundscape. Too often experimental sonics sound like novelties rather than necessities. It’s too bad, for when Davis locks in with drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and guitarist Julian Lage, especially on two takes of Wayne Shorter’s “Dolores” and a three-part tribute to Charlie Parker, the band sounds great.

Sometimes the best piano trios are led not by the pianist but by the drummer. That was true of last year’s Dedication by the Dan Weiss Trio, featuring pianist Jacob Sacks. And it’s true of this year’s Continuing by the Tyshawn Sorey Trio, featuring pianist Aaron Diehl. Sorey is a composer who has made waves in both the jazz and classical worlds, but for this project, he demonstrates his imposing percussion skills on a set of four jazz standards, each clocking in at 10 minutes or more. These long interpretations never falter, because all three musicians (including bassist Matt Brewer) keep stretching and squeezing the rhythm in astonishing ways under the pleasurable melodies.

Pédron Rubalcaba, my favorite jazz piano album of the year, comes from the unaccompanied duo of Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba and French alto saxophonist Pierrick Pédron. The minimalism of the format allows the great emotion of the playing to shine through. The repertoire of three show tunes and five standards by jazz composers allows the two musicians to explore the give-and-take between hope and frustration through the tug-of-war between single-note lines of melody and dense clusters of harmony. At times they converge in flights of optimism, but at other times the tune is caught in the grinding gears of harmonic doubt. The result is terrific drama.

This wouldn’t work as well as it does if Rubalcaba weren’t such a genius at always keeping the melody in our ear as he’s building dense, two-handed chords. While his other fingers are at work on creating and then changing the harmony, he always has one or two fingers in the right hand keeping the tune—or some recognizable cousin of it—in the air. He’s also a master of dynamics, shifting gears from quiet rumination (as on Carla Bley’s “Lawns”) and boisterous, even dissonant declaration (as on Jackie McLean’s “Five Will Get You Ten”) when the story requires. Against this rich backdrop, Pédron’s sax is the perfect foil, providing the stifled sob of a cabaret singer when required.

Richard X. Bennett (not to be confused with the Nashville country guitarist) is a Brooklyn jazz pianist who composes music that is rambunctious, rude and downright catchy all at once. During the pandemic’s isolation, he wrote a series of new pieces for his friend, the saxophonist Matt Parker. Finally released this year as Parker Plays X, the music reflects the compression of wild, youthful energy within a small New York apartment.

That paradox serves the two musicians well, for they find the sweet spot between jazz and R&B instrumentals. Most acts who aim for that fusion settle for a dumbed-down version of each ingredient, but Bennett and Parker avoid that by aiming for an ambitious form of each. They create ear-grabbing themes but never settle for simple repetition. Instead their variations keep evolving and generating new surprises.

Many of the developments discussed in this essay can be traced back to the seminal jazz pianist Bill Evans. After his historic contribution to Miles Davis’s 1959 album Kind of Blue, Evans launched a solo career, mostly as the leader of piano trios. Evans pioneered the democratic trio, where the bassist and drummer are equal partners with the pianist and expanded jazz harmony by using fourths and sevenths more than thirds and fifths. Such restless exploration made each Evans performance different from the rest.

Over the past 11 years, music archivist Zev Feldman has released nine box sets of unreleased Evans recordings, most of them offering two CDs and thick, lavishly illustrated booklets with both history and commentary on the performances. Feldman calls himself the “jazz detective,” and his sleuthing has unearthed forgotten tapes that document Evans with different combos and different approaches in different settings. Some are better than others, but none is superfluous.

The latest release is Treasures, a collection of Danish radio broadcasts between 1965 and 1969. There are six solo-piano tracks, 18 piano-trio tracks and six tracks of the piano trio with symphony orchestra and six jazz horns. Evans is less interesting as a solo pianist, but these trio tracks are terrific—especially the versions of “I Should Care” and “Nardis.” Evans’ tender touch on the keys is usually warm, but then it can suddenly turn icy as it plunges into melancholy. And the symphonic arrangements by trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg lend a cinematic breadth to Evans’ chord extensions.

Contributing an insightful essay to the thick booklet for Treasures is Matthew Shipp. Shipp is often pigeonholed as an avant-garde jazz musician—and not without reason—but his appreciation for Evan’s rigorous but heartfelt approach explains why Shipp’s own playing, even at its most thunderous and freewheeling, is so full of emotion and musical memes. His experimentation always has a purpose.

That’s obvious on his new album, Live at Carrboro, a trio outing with tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman and drummer Jeff Cosgrove. This recording is one, non-stop, 54-minute improvisation recorded live in North Carolina. It’s not noodling; it’s dialogue in the moment. Shipp and Perelman have been playing together for years, so they know each other’s language and always have something interesting to share. Cosgrove fills in the gaps with the impressionist colors of Evans’ most notable drummer, Paul Motian.

Listen to an exclusive performance from Bill Evans live at Carnegie Hall in 1973:

An Ode to Jazz Piano

A Curmudgeon Column