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Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

CD: Corea, Gomez, Motian

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Chick Corea, Eddie Gomez, Paul Motian, Further Explorations (Concord)

The two-CD album is described in the notes as a “template,” a “tabula rasa,” rather than a tribute to Bill Evans. Nonetheless, Corea’s encounter with two great Evans sidemen underlines Evans’s profound influence on the development of the jazz piano trio and on Corea’s own playing. Released less than a month following Motian’s death at 80, the live recording from New York’s Blue Note beautifully captures the drummer’s freedom, swing and interaction. In pieces from Evans’s repertoire and others by members of the trio, there is a spirit of adventure and, in Evans’s newly found “Song No. 1,” the challenge of discovery.

Comments

  1. You were right, Doug. This is indeed a beautiful recording! The interplay between the three, stellar musicians was absolutely captivating. For my tastes, some of Eddie Gomez’ bow work could have been minimized but that’s just my personal preference. I did notice the aforementioned bow work praised in this comprehensive review by Steve Futterman in the Jan. 30, 2012 issue of The New Yorker and have painstakingly typed it in here:

    Jazz Notes
    Waltz For Bill

    With the unexpected death of the drummer Paul Motian, last November, “Further Explorations” (Concord), an album intended to be an homage to the pianist Bill Evans, has become a double tribute. Motian, an intregral member of Evan’s landmark trio of the early sixties, joined by pianist Chick Corea and the bassist Eddie Gomez (a longtime Evans associate whose tenure never coincided with Motian’s) for a stint at the Blue Note in May of 2010, the results of which are captured on this bracing double-disk set.

    Signature tunes from the Evans canon are here, but so are originals by the members of the trio, along with popular and jazz standards unrecorded by him and open-form pieces of an exploratory nature not generally associated with the pianist. A deeply felt celebration of an iconic figure, the album nonetheless pulses with its own heart.

    Jazz pianists of Corea’s generation (he turned seventy in June) welcomed Evans’s influence, but Corea has proved himself his own man. He’s taken the best of Evans (the gorgeous keyboard touch, the harmonic acuity, the heightened sensitivity to melody) and run with it, adding his own playfulness and rhythmic vigor. Gomez, whose energy and intuitive interplay bind the threesome, is particularly effective when wielding a bow (especially on “Another Tango” an example of a musical genre beloved by Corea and untouched by Evans.

    Motian may have been perfect for the now legendary Evans trio of 1961, which included the doomed young bass genius Scott LaFaro (who was killed in an automobile accident at age twenty-five) but in the succeeding decades, he developed an individual musical identity, one defiantly eccentric in nature. On “Further Explorations” though, he remains on his best behavior and is lustrous in his restraint. His occasional out-of-left-field maneuvers–effects that might have given his former employer apoplexy–are catnip to the adventurous Corea.

    Evans, dead at age fifty-one in 1980, left us too soon. As this new recording makes clear, the eighty-year old Motian still had plenty more to give as well.”

    Bravo to Mr. Futterman for a vastly entertaining review! For those Bill Evans/Scott LaFaro fans out there, I recently stumbled across a wonderful recording by New York City basist Phil Palombi who was able to use LaFaro’s Abraham Prescott bass…the one that was with LaFaro at the time of his fatal accident and which was repaired by Kolstein & Sons in Baldwin, New York. Palombi recorded “RE: Person I Knew A tribute to Scott LaFaro” with pianist Don Friedman and drummer Eliot Zigmud, coincidentally another Bill Evans Trio alumnus. The Palombi CD, as well as links to some video clips of this unique trio in concert, can be found on Palombi’s website http://www.philpalombi.com. It seems that, at least for me, all musical roads somehow lead straight to Bill Evans.

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