Christian Jacob, Beautiful Jazz, A Private Concert

Judging from how many post-Bill Evans, fully harmonic piano players' CDs I get regularly you would think that the style predominates today. Yet this is by no means a simple route to follow in the jazz piano world.

Today we have another pianist who owes something to the fully worked harmonic respellings that Bill Evans did so splendidly. Yet there is something much more at work here as well, although there may also be less of the rigorously respelled harmonics on a continual basis, perhaps. I refer to pianist Christian Jacob and his solo piano recital album Beautiful Jazz (Wilder Jazz 1401). Here we have Jacob attack twelve well-visited standards plus a version of Stravinsky's "Etude No. 4".

What sets Christian apart has to do with a lively rhythmic approach, a contrapuntal involvement of the left hand that is sometimes almost stride-like, only not in any predictable way.

He has a very concerted technique that has the sophisticated harmonics of post-Evansian style yet takes less of a block-chord approach (and of course later Evans got further away from that as well). But there is a nicely original rubato style happening with Jacob that takes him further afield. That is in part a Jarrettian trait too, but there is nothing all that similar going on between to the two players because Jacob takes it into his own realm.

Listen to the old potboiler "Tea For Two" and you hear stride roots, an almost Garnerian left hand but not in the lag-bounce Garner way.

I find this album quite refreshing. It's doing what's being done yet doing it in Christian Jacob's own way. That interests me and should interest you too if you are a piano-jazz hound.

Listen!

Mike Wofford, It's Personal

Mike Wofford first came to my attention as a key member of Shelly Manne's later configurations toward the later '70s-early '80s. He also played a key role as accompanist to Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. He has always struck me as pianist thoroughly embodying the bop and after ethos but very much in his own intelligent and soulful way.

That he sounds better than ever these days is clear from his latest, a solo outing called It's Personal (Capri 74121-2). And surely this is a very personal summing up of where Wofford has been and where he is, through an impassioned set of rather unexpected standards and memorable originals. I like how he starts with a striking voicing of Jackie McLean's classic "Little Melonae," which swings yet brings out at the same time the advanced sound of that composition. After so many years, the work still sounds startlingly fresh and Mike gets his best into it.

From there we get a lively program of Ellington-Strayhorn, Dizzy, Carisi's perennial "Springsville," prime Gigi Gryce, even a Talking Heads song, in a complete package that gives you a satisfying in-the-moment portrait of Wofford's fertile melodic-harmonic way in its full-strength glory.

Wofford's cumulative from the inside-out self-presentation moves, charms and strongly delivers the pianistic goods. It is certainly personal but its appeal seems to me nearly universal, insofar as any jazz can be that. Listen and you will hear what I mean, I hope.