At last. It’s been clear since she first emerged that German pianist Johanna Summer is an extraordinary soloist and virtuoso. But none of her work to date has really resonated beyond the ”wow what an incredible classical technique” dimension until this latest. Perhaps the classical strictness of her style took time to get used to. Her jazz affinity is clearest here. Perhaps she is more of a classical player than a jazz one. Perhaps, perhaps, a lot of these perhapses are still valid.
However there are fewer maybes about this well curated selection on a very still and gathered solo piano album that revels in simplicity.
I love the version of Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ but without being a party pooper think back and Brad Mehldau’s is even better.
Nevertheless this is worth hearing and to her credit Summer is NOTHING like Mehldau as a player on this recording. And given so many pianists copy what he does that is refreshing at this exalted level. ‘Giant Steps’ is done more as an étude and you could say that about a lot of what’s here. Its extreme slowness is in a way a statement. Summer’s deft composition ‘Shush’ slides little modal feints into one another without being designer minimalist (which is usually horrible) or too Bill Evans (definitely not horrible) at all. But again escaping the shadow of Evans which the pianist easily does with such restrain is an achievement few can dream of ever attaining.
Described by the label as an EP (which is distracting – but don’t be detained by any issues of packaging or brevity) – Upright is nevertheless more of an album given how complete and full everything seems.
And yet it is all over in a flash. The tunes were made during the recording of the extraordinary singer Malakoff Kowalski’s Songs With Words which was released last month by Sony Classical.
Souls and nights and dollars and wine,
Old love and remembrance – I resign
All cities, all jazz, all echoes of Time,
But what shall I do with my green valentine?From Green Valentine – Allen Ginsberg
Clearly it was an inspirational time in so many ways. For its vaudevillian atmosphere I’d pick out Summer with Kowalski on the setting of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Green Valentine’ to Debussy’s ‘La Plus que Lente’ found on ‘A Strange Wild Leaf’ as one of the several prime go-to numbers of all these.
Highlights of the equally slower than slowness of Upright? Oh the halting treatment of ‘I Remember You’ which is nothing like any version I know of the standard and the Wagnerian elegy at the end, a piece written while Wagner in 1858 was in the throes of composing Tristan und Isolde, is an education.
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