Lonely Voyage of Player, Piano and Audience By NATE CHINEN
CRAIG TABORN was deep into a solo expedition one recent evening at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan, seeming for all the world like someone cracking a secret code. Poised for action at a grand piano, he disrupted an expectant stillness with a turbulent digression. With his left hand he formed the lopsided bass-clef vamp of a piece called “Avenging Angel”; with his right he improvised complex annotations, firing them off in boldface or sleek cursive. It was taut, transfixing music, sharpened by the austerity of the setting: just Mr. Taborn at the piano, on his own.
Solo piano, as a mode of performance, holds a privileged place in jazz, with a history predating the origins of the genre. What’s striking is the way that artists keep renewing the relevance of the format, which hasn’t changed much, in mechanical terms, for well over a century. Just within the last month or so there have been accomplished new releases not only from Mr. Taborn — “Avenging Angel” doubles as the name of his ECM debut — but also Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Larry Goldings, pianists of wildly different temperament. These and a few other recent albums share an understanding of jazz’s far-reaching solo-piano tradition. The diversity among them nudges that territory still further.
The dual objective of a solitary jazz pianist has always been entertainment and enlightenment; it’s the relationship between the two that has shifted over the years. Any pianist approaching the task today has to begin by deciding where to come down on the issue, since precursors lurk at every point along the spectrum. The most compelling solo jazz piano music has a way of blurring the lines, valorizing technical astonishments mainly as a means to an end, while delivering less tangible, more mysterious rewards.
At the turn of the last century, when Scott Joplin published “Maple Leaf Rag,” enjoyment naturally led the agenda. Jazz history has since claimed the song as a bedrock text; it leads off both the “The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz,” compiled in 1973, and “Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology,” issued this year. (Both compilations feature multiple versions, first as intended by Joplin and then as interpreted by jazz musicians.) A genuine sensation at a time when sheet-music sales provided the metric for success, “Maple Leaf Rag” probably won some of its admirers firsthand, so to speak, as they grappled with the canny arpeggios juddering through the song.
Improvisation became more of a priority with the advent of the stride style, which featured a steady left-hand chug to mask the absence of accompaniment. Among the early stride heroes, starting in the 1920s, were James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. The following decade brought solo pianism ranging from the terse economy of Teddy Wilson to the sparkling fullness of Earl Hines. And then there was Art Tatum, a solo pianist of such spectacular authority that many would argue he has yet to be surpassed.
Tatum drew on so much music, from stride to classical, that he gave the impression of endless possibility at the piano. He also mastered the feeling of surprise. His playing was as much about discovery as dexterity. But his legend has coalesced around the issue of technique, sometimes to the point of fetishization. A few years ago a company called Zenph Sound Innovations staged an unmanned performance of his album “Piano Starts Here,” using proprietary technology and a Yamaha Disklavier. (A CD was later issued under his name, with the subtitle “Live at the Shrine,” which is accurate only to a point.)
The evolution of modern jazz put a premium on cooperative rhythm-section interplay, making the self-contained world of solo piano seem a bit like a noble antiquity. Bebop in particular produced more than one generation of players with a powerful right hand and a subordinate left hand: the piano-playing equivalent of a fiddler crab. And yet there continued to be those who understood solo playing as its own separate discipline, artists like Erroll Garner, Jaki Byard and Dave McKenna. The great oblique modernist Thelonious Monk did some strong, distilled work in the format, notably on “Alone in San Francisco,” recorded in 1959 and reissued by Concord last month.
The first word in that album title crops up often in modern jazz’s solo-piano literature, almost like an existential cry. Ray Bryant, who died last month at 79, released his first solo album, “Alone with the Blues,” in 1958. A decade later Bill Evans named his first true solo album “Alone,” and any hint of vulnerability in the title was probably genuine. He was known to have had steep trepidation about solo playing, with its unforgiving clarity and lack of interplay. (His previous solo effort, “Conversations With Myself,” famously hedged the issue by featuring three piano tracks, overdubbed.)
Evans made a sequel, “Alone Again,” in 1975, the same year that “Alone, Again” was released by his steelier contemporary Paul Bley. And if solo playing elicited anxiety for a pianist like Evans, it has been nothing but liberating for Mr. Bley, who is now 78 and has a body of highly regarded solo albums behind him. Some of these — like his 2007 ECM album “Solo in Mondsee” — revolve around blank-canvas improvisation, underscoring the appeal of the format to pianists of avant-garde temperament. Cecil Taylor, the free-jazz paragon, has been a lionized solo pianist for most of his long career. But the imperative of exploration doesn’t stop with free improvisers; it has become a necessary subtext even for a solo pianist engaging with songs.
The French pianist Martial Solal, now in his 80s, is known for pairing Tatumesque virtuosity with a wryly digressive approach to melody. Last year Geri Allen released an album of gorgeous, rippling originals inspired by the pianism of Mr. Taylor, Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner.
This spring two leading contemporary pianists released solo albums that treat songs like discrete excursions: “Alone at the Vanguard” (there’s that word again), by Fred Hersch, on Palmetto; and “Live in Marciac,” by Brad Mehldau, on Nonesuch. “Labyrinth,” a new album from Denny Zeitlin, just out on Sunnyside, leaves a similar impression. It bears noting that these are all live recordings: jazz is a music of interaction even in its strictest form, and a lone pianist playing to an audience isn’t, in the end, really alone.
Which may be one way to explain the predominance of Keith Jarrett in the solo field over the last 40 years. His 1975 “Köln Concert,” on ECM, is the best-selling solo-piano album of all time, and the cornerstone of a rarefied career. An improviser with the instincts of a conjurer, Mr. Jarrett often communicates inspired stoicism in his solo playing, even when he’s flirting with sentiment. The presence of a worshipful audience helps his cause.
And the absence of that audience is palpable on “The Melody at Night, With You” (ECM), from 1999. Recorded in a home studio while Mr. Jarrett was convalescing from chronic fatigue syndrome, it’s a dry, contemplative album, a plate of standards austerely and lovingly served. Its mood suggests deep seclusion: the “With You” in the title, a dedication to his wife at the time, is also an invitation to the listener, a key to entry.
A similar invitation is offered throughout “In My Room” (BFM), the solo-piano debut of Mr. Goldings, who’s best known in jazz circles as a Hammond B-3 organist. The image and typography on the album’s cover evoke the stylishly minimalist house aesthetic of ECM, and some of its originals, like “Crawdaddy,” bear the thumbprint of Mr. Jarrett. But Mr. Goldings, who has a steady gig with James Taylor, ultimately presents a calmly coherent style, inspired by pastoral notions of Americana: “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” The album’s cloistered title comes from the Beach Boys song.
There’s no such breeziness in “Fé ... Faith,” the first release on Mr. Rubalcaba’s 5Passion label. It’s an album of exquisite touch: Mr. Rubalcaba, who lives in South Florida, is a product of Cuba’s elite musical conservatory, and his classical training has never left him. Beautifully recorded, it begins in a kind of cathedral stillness — Mr. Rubalcaba didn’t come by its title casually — and slowly warms to its own premise. There are crisp, exploratory essays based on themes by John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis with Bill Evans. There are silvery originals inspired by Cuban batá drumming, and by each of Mr. Rubalcaba’s three children. The whole album gleams.
“Fé ... Faith” might have even been the most startlingly good solo jazz piano album released this year, were it not for “Avenging Angel.” That album — a clutch of compact interrogations, unpremeditated but structurally coherent — reflects Mr. Taborn’s galactically broad interests, along with his multifaceted technique. You might hear flashes of 20th-century classical music: Ligeti perhaps, or Messiaen. You might hear echoes of Mr. Jarrett and Mr. Bley (and ECM’s founder-producer, Manfred Eicher). In the album’s obsession with permutation, you might hear shades of electronic music.
Mr. Taborn has been a busy but discerning sideman over the last 15 years and a smart but seemingly reluctant headliner. His previous album, a technophile opus called “Junk Magic” (Thirsty Ear), was released back in 2004. “Avenging Angel” hardly captures the full scope of his personality, but as with “Modernistic” (Blue Note), Jason Moran’s acclaimed solo foray from 2002, it does articulate a vision, a personal manifesto.
At the heart of Mr. Taborn’s enterprise is a fascination with pure sound. The album is full of moments where a note hangs sharply in the air, and you hear the gathering overtones, the vibrations of the strings. This was even clearer at the Rubin, where Mr. Taborn began his concert in test mode, slowly confronting each new chord as an event. His performance never flagged, because he had so many angles of inquiry: at one point, hammering fast with both hands, he produced the loudest sound I’ve ever heard from an acoustic piano, and then abruptly pulled back, finessing a melody reminiscent of flower petals.
There was virtuosity but little ostentation in the playing, no hint of ingratiating an audience. Which is not new in itself. What’s new is Mr. Taborn’s particular approach, which has opened up yet another corridor in jazz’s solo-piano wing, where the renovation never ends.
