Delights include a version of everyone’s favourite standard ‘All the Things You Are’ but that’s only the start of it and the real meat of the album isn’t just standards.
This new album marks a shift away from ECM for the pianist who to us was the best ever pianist in any group led by bass icon Avishai Cohen. Most others just couldn’t and can’t do what he did on Gently Disturbed.
As an artist under his own steam he is as remarkably ingenious. And I reckon he is as world class at the top of the tree in terms of individualism if not the same styles often as Tigran, Marcin Wasilewski, Brad Mehldau, Vijay Iyer, Ethan Iverson, Renee Rosnes, Robert Glasper, Kit Downes, Stefano Bollani, Django Bates, Marcin Masecki and Jason Moran.
Proof? Look no further than his first masterpiece The Dream Thief.
This is his first solo piano recording. The way the sonics are it’s not clinical or severe. I certainly liked the lilting conversational style of ‘Gloria’. And above all the feel of the album is human. The style communicates on a deep level without setting itself up on a pedestal or swamping the ideas in obscurity or overly involved side statements.
There’s a stylistic range here so you get some avant-isms wrapped in away from the main more middle of the road strands. ‘Monkey Mind (Chaos is an Intimate Thing)’ is the main avant statement and begins pretty out there before gaining structures that map the whole trajectory of the piece out quite exhilaratingly as Maestro even can be heard to grunt his way through the more taxing bits.
Split into two: the Miniatures series revels in brevity and spontaneity while the Tales passages are longer more involved compositions.
Born in Israel in 1987, Maestro was only 19 when he joined Avishai Cohen’s trio moving on later to debut his own trio in 2011. On ECM he found new audiences and his legend grew still more.
I found a new version of ‘From One Soul To Another’ especially quite moving. This is where you can really delve into the overtones of the sonics that bit more and linger long as sound overhangs and falls into the following silences at the aftermath of the note created by the pianist emotionally at each step of the way.
The album overall is accessible – you don’t need to be a hardcore jazz fan to appreciate what’s here given that there is plenty of melodic resource and a logic to the language framed in a persuasive technique. But that doesn’t mean it’s an abnegation.
Simplicity before the rites and rituals of jazz is a strength in itself and the complex is often folded in so you grow as a listener within the arc of the increasing reliance on complexity when it is needed. Highlights include a like a ripple on a stream (to riff off the words) version of 1930s standard ‘For All We Know’ covered so luminously by Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden on their classic Jasmine a decade and a half ago. It’s impossible to escape the shadow of Jarrett – who turned 80 on 8 May – at the moment given the power of Belonging in its new version by Branford Marsalis. And at times with Maestro the Keith influence is angelic and as real as a love of the dawning of the day.
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