Matthew Shipp, I've Been to Many Places

Just coming out now is the latest solo piano album from Matthew Shipp, I've Been to Many Places (Thirsty Ear 57209.2). It marks a point of departure for Matthew in that he in essence is summing up his musical endeavors, looking backwards and by being where he is now making of that looking back something new.

That of course has to do with Matthew's emphasis on the spontaneity of his musical invention. How he plays something he did years ago now is not reproduction but rather re-creation. So we get "Tenderly", recorded originally with David S. Ware's Quartet, "Summertime", first recorded in duet with William Parker, and "Where is the Love," which was used as a loop on a recording with hip-hop artist El-p. And what he does with all of these is to renew them, to make them anew. Such is the case throughout.

As Matt himself suggests on the liners, this album gives us a kind of culmination of Matthew the musical thinker executed one-to-one from thoughts to keys. He is charged with kinetic electricity throughout, taking a step from freedom of expression to a kind of mind-meld of Matt-inside-his-pianistic-head.

The set has real flow. The difference between open-form key weaving and "standard" is one of setting loose the harmonic-melodic familiarity of a song form with the same attention to being in the now of creation.

It gives you an excellent picture of Maestro Shipp as he expresses himself today, right now. And for that it is exceptional. There is nothing that sounds tentative. All sound is in command and commanding. The two versions of "Where is the Love" spell that out nicely. One is filled with forward momentum, the other more reflective. And if there was a third version, it would be no doubt something else again. He has his piano sound directly wired into his creative head, from a jab or a legato phrase to the way he makes the piano sustain when he wants it to. He is moulding the sound at every moment in his own vision.

I've Been to Many Places has all the makings of one of the prime improvisational piano solo albums of the year, maybe the album. Needless to say I recommend you get it!

Laszlo Gardony, Clarity

Solo piano improvisation disks are common now. They used to be relatively rare. Keith Jarrett can be thanked or blamed for that. Thanked because his vision of solo piano opened up a way of thinking about solo music and freedom--as did Cecil Taylor of course, in very different ways. Both may be said to have created two hugely influential, very separate poles of the music. Their influence is everywhere. If I say blame as well as thank, it's because there are tipping points where a school of playing becomes near-cloning. It's never the artist's fault really. We saw it with Bird, with Miles, with many over the years, and it is something that happens when influence grows to a certain point in the music. It does not mean that there isn't (or wasn't) great music coming out of influenced players. What's negative is when the sound of "surprise" becomes the sound of "surprised tradition," or if at any rate the surprise starts to go missing.

Today we have a solo piano disk of note, more in the Jarrettian than the Taylorian tradition. I speak of Laszlo Gardony and his Clarity (Sunnyside 4014). Laszlo comes across here as more of an expressive player than a technical wizard. There's something of Jarrett in the gospelly trance things, the lyrical rubatos, and so based on how much there is of that, definitely you have an influenced player.

Laszlo was born in Hungary, teaches at Berklee. Some of his Hungarian roots come out in minor key inspirations and a few folksy melodies, otherwise there is the international style in play.

The fact is, after a point the influence game only tells the listener something of what to expect, and it tells us how much in a period certain players dominate the scene, or to what degree they do. After that it is up to the artist to transcend his initial inspiration and give us his own creative being, or there's no point in listening. Laszlo does that and the session ultimately gives you music worth spending time with. It whets my appetite for some more Gardony trio things!

Sir Roland Hanna Piano Solo: Colors From a Giant's Kit

Like Jaki Byard, Roland Hanna was a pianist who had absorbed the entire jazz tradition and his playing reflected that. His posthumously released solo session, Colors from A Giant's Kit (IPO), finds him in the mood to cover a lot of ground. There are some quite fetching originals and well-chosen standards, from Duke through Trane. All of it shows us a more intimate side of Hanna that what you'd get, say, in his work with the Jones-Lewis band.

His more reflective pieces show a bit of a classical-romantic rhapsodic influence. But then he'll turn around and whip off "20th Century Rag," a kind of post-rag rag that gives us a little of the musical flavors of Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington in their early modern zone.

It matters little where you begin this album. Every track is filled with the Hanna sound and approach.

Here's a player that was taken a little too much for granted during his lifetime. Colors From A Giant's Kit shows us some of the pre-post-bop Hanna many of us missed while he was here. It's something we can be thankful was captured on the digital channels of this new CD. Listen and learn.

Pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba's Intimate and Engaging Solo Album "Faith"

Anyone who has followed the career of Cuba's pianistic dynamo Gonzalo Rubalcaba no doubt has some favorite recordings they especially like of his. Since his wider exposure as an artist to the world there have been many very good and some great ones. But to my knowledge there has been nothing that compares with his recent CD Faith (5 Pasion).

It's solo piano all the way. It is a very intimate performance. You feel like you have dropped in on Rubalcaba at his home as he is in the middle of an inspired performance with no thought of an audience. It's almost as if he is playing for himself, expressing something rather deep and almost private. He engages jazz classics, his own pieces and sheer improvisations, passages inspired by John Coltrane and some attention to his Cuban roots, though in a more abstracted way than was typically the case in some of his earlier work. The sheer liberation of a solo performance and his increasing artistic maturity bring out a side of Rubalcaba not as often seen in his recorded opus. That is, a Rubalcaba that uses his tremendous inventive facility and imagination to search within himself, so to speak.

This is a Rubalcaba that engaes the whole of his musical experience and transforms it into his personal impression of what it all means. A summing up. The title Faith is not some catchy marketing sort of thing. Because the theme as Gonzalo states in the liner notes is a kind of exploration of how people of whatever religious or belief-system persuasion rely upon their faith to get them through difficult times.

It is a very moving performance, a remarkable piece of pianism, a heart-felt searching into musical tone as an expression of something much larger than our petty everyday concerns. Beautiful!