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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Recent Listening: These Pianists Are From Venus

July 23, 2010 by Doug Ramsey

The Japanese have a longstanding love affair with jazz piano. Albums by jazz pianists sell consistently well in Japan. Leading pianists from around the world perform there in concerts and clubs. Indeed, the country has produced its own crops of world-class pianists, among them Toshiko Akiyoshi, Makoto Ozone, Kei Akagi, Junko Onishi and the current phenomenon Hiromi Uehara. A Japanese promoter organizes an annual tour called 100 Gold Fingers that features 10 prominent pianists in concert. The tour has included at one time or another Hank Jones, Roger Kellaway, Eddie Higgins, Jessica Williams, Junior Mance, Bill Charlap, Renee Rosnes, Cedar Walton and Ray Bryant, among many others.
No one in Japan is more committed to jazz piano than Tetsuo Hara. He records horn players and singers, too, but his Venus Records catalog is packed with CDs by some of the music’s most prominent keyboard artists. Hara records many of them in New YorkThumbnail image for Venus Logo.jpg under his supervision and that of the veteran producer Todd Barkan. His recordings have superior sound by first-rate engineers like Jim Anderson, David Darlington and Katherine Miller. For years, it was difficult and expensive for people outside Japan to acquire Venus records. Now, most of them are available in the US and elsewhere; at import prices, it’s true, but bargain offers show up on some web sites. Although original compositions occasionally materialize on Venus albums, Mr. Hara’s inclination is to have his artists record familiar music. In general, the results confirm that the song form offers endless possibilities, as even the famously iconoclastic saxophonist Archie Shepp demonstrates in his four Venus CDs.
Today’s topic, however, is pianists.
Roland Hanna, Après Un Reve (Venus). In this exquisite little recital, the pianist bases his improvisations on music by Schubert, Fauré, Borodin, Chopin, Mozart, Dvořák, Mahler Thumbnail image for Hanna Apres.jpgand Anton Rubenstein. He recorded it less than two months before he died in November, 2002. Ron Carter’s bass lines and Grady Tate’s all-but-weightless drumming are perfect complements to Hanna, who reaches deep into the harmonic opportunites in pieces generations have loved for their melodies. Hanna’s clarity of conception and lightness of touch are beautifully captured in this flawlessly engineered recording. Among the pleasures here are his chord substitutions as he makes his stately way through Mozart’s indelible “Elvira Madigan” theme from the Op. 21 C Major Piano Concerto, the gravity of the trio’s treatment of the second movement of Mahler’s Symphony No 5 and—between those mostly solemn reflections—a Dvořák backbeat boogaloo on “Going Home” from The New World Symphony. This is a gem in Roland Hanna’s discography.
Eddie Higgins, If Dreams Come True (Venus). It is an indication of Higgins’s (1932-2009) popularity in Japan that the Venus catalog has 29 CDs under his name. Several of them, including this one from 2004, are trio or small band albums with bassist Jay Leonhart and drummer JoeThumbnail image for Higgins If Dreams.jpg Ascione. In accordance with the Hara dictum, all of the pieces but one are standards. That one, “Shinjuku Twilight,” is an attractive A-minor theme that stimulates Higgins and Leonhart to some of their best soloing in an album in which both are at the tops of their games. “Standards” doesn’t necessarily mean warhorses. “A Weekend in Havana” and “Into the Memory” are hardly overdone, and Higgins does them to a turn. It’s good to hear Higgins caress Xavier Cugat’s rarely performed ‘Nightingale,” convert “Days of Wine and Roses” into a “Killer Joe” soundalike and recall Django Reinhardt with a jaunty revival of “Minor Swing.” Alec Wilder’s “Moon and Sand” becomes a modified samba. The piece de resistance is “St. Louis Blues,” with a boogie woogie component that may not have been intended as tribute to Earl Hines but would surely have generated one of Hines’ thousand-watt smiles if he had heard it.
Stanley Cowell, Dancers In Love (Venus). Cowell recorded this in 1999 with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, young lions beginning to make their names. He had already established his own reputation among musicians but to this day remains unfamiliar even to many dedicated jazz listeners. In part, that is because Cowell has dedicated much of the latter part of his career to jazz education, most recently with tenure at Rutgers Thumbnail image for Cowell Dancers.jpgUniversity. He is a complete pianist, capable not only of demonstrating the formidable technical aspects of Art Tatum but also of capturing the elusive subtleties and eccentricities of Thelonious Monk. In this album he employs his absolute command of the keyboard not in the service of display but of musical expression. Over the years, Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” has become a vehicle for speedsters. Cowell takes it at the pace of a leisurely walk, disclosing the lyricism concealed in its intriguing harmonies. In a brief exposition of Duke Ellington’s “Dancers in Love,” he gets inside Ellington’s whimsy. He laces the cowboy song “Ole Texas” and a South African folk song with musical values and plays the whey out of Eubie Blake’s “Charleston Rag,” complete with bebop moments that make perfect sense. Cowell includes two originals, a bittersweet ballad called “I Never Dreamed” and “St. Croix,” which sparkles with calypso verve. His inventiveness in Gershwin’s “But Not For Me” is dazzling. This rarity of an album, like Cowell himself, should be better known.

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Comments

  1. Tim says

    July 23, 2010 at 6:25 am

    Doug,
    Even though you continue to do harm to my bank account through these reviews, I would like to thank you for bringing attention to so many new recordings and artists. I knew the name of Stanley Cowell, but not his music. That will soon change. By the way, what’s with that cover for the Roland Hanna CD? In deference to Faure, that image suggests to me that it’s more likely “apres un cauchemar”.

  2. Chris Rich says

    July 23, 2010 at 6:36 pm

    Yes that Hanna cover is best left at that size…yikes.
    Mr. Cowell was part of the very first real jazz concert I ever saw in the 70s at New England Conservatory. He was in a Piano Choir, all pianists including Sonelius Smith, Harold Mabern, Webster Lewis and several others. It had a stunning flow.
    The arista Freedom LP Brilliant Circles is gorgeous and he made a trio release for ECM before it went all pastel.

  3. Doug Zielke says

    July 23, 2010 at 7:01 pm

    Regarding the sound quality of Venus recordings…
    They are, indeed, superb! And for vinyl-philes like myself, many titles from the Venus catalog are available as quality LP’s.

  4. Jeff Rzepiela says

    July 24, 2010 at 6:32 am

    Actually, these covers are tame for Venus. Charles McPherson went so far as to post a disclaimer on his website that he had nothing to do with the cover chosen for a recording he did for Venus and that he found it distasteful.
    http://www.charlesmcpherson.com/disclaimer.html

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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