Inverted Garden

Parallels: Guillermo Klein at the Village Vanguard

One of the new compositions that Los Guachos played last night was a tight, off-centered round called "Parallel." It was a highlight of the second set and spoke to a deeper truth in Los Guachos' construction: in many ways, this band of eleven speaks in a series of concurrent dialogues. Some of the clearest, most arresting moments of last night's performance came when these two-way conversations rose above the rest of the music—Jeff Ballard and Richard Nant exchanging rhtyhms on drums and bombo; Guillermo Klein and Ben Monder weaving piano and guitar lines between one another's strings; dueling strikes in the horn section cutting through the air like clashing épées.

Many arrangers with eleven instruments at their disposal would deploy them more or less in unison, making loud, bold music. Great arrangers like Guillermo carve lots of small ensembles out of a larger ensemble. The trick is creating a tremendous density of ideas while not piling on too much sonic weight. At this, Guillermo is a master musical manipulator.

Ethan Iverson was there last night as well, and he has a nice review of the show over at Do The Math. (Jeff Ballard, indeed!) And via Ethan's blog, I discovered the meaning of a cryptic remark Guillermo made to me last night. "You're an eminence in Argentine jazz now, people are quoting you," Guillermo told me as we stood by the Vanguard's backdoor on Waverly Place. I laughed it off as flattery, but I should have realized Guillermo doesn't flatter.

In his review of Klein's show at Duke over the weekend, The Thread's Brian Howe cites my Argentine-jazz radio documentary pretty extensively. A nascent discussion is even breaking out in the comment thread with the Argentine bassist Pablo Aslan. (My reply is awaiting moderation.) NPR jazz blogger-in-chief Patrick Jarenwattananon has a must-read guest post there as well.

Photo credit: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times (from Guillermo's last appearance at the Vanguard, August 2010)

Fer Isella: Talking Guillermo Klein and Argentine jazz

Guillermo Klein and Los Guachos open their week-long run at the Village Vanguard tonight, and loyal readers will know that I'm very excited about it. I've been writing about Argentine jazz for the last three years, and this blog offers plenty of resources for those who are new to Klein and his jazz argentino brethren. First, there's my radio documentary "Sounds of Upheaval: Guillermo Klein and the new Argentine jazz," which played last August on The Checkout. Then, there are the interviews and commentary that a source no less than National Public Radio dubbed "a treasure trove of Argentine jazz." (How's that for horn-tooting!)

Last year, as I rushed to translate and edit said treasure trove, one essential interview fell through the cracks: a discussion about Guillermo Klein with his friend and collaborator Fer Isella. Fer is an award-winning record impresario, a top-notch producer, and a wonderful pianist and singer. His first album, Doña Furia Gaucha was an elegant and lyrical document of his years in New York with the band Makanudos. His upcoming album, Cosecha, features a lot of the key players on the Buenos Aires scene—among them Guillermo Klein's closest collaborator, Richard Nant. Fer is one of these people—specific to certain sectors of the music business—who's so talented he ends up performing pretty much every role, from negotiating major distribution deals to laying down backing vocals. This is not the last you'll hear from Fer Isella on this blog, but in honor of Klein's visit, I thought it high time to post this short discussion.

Eric Benson: Limbo Music, your record label, distributes Guillermo's albums in Argentina. How did that start?

Fer Isella: I had this dream of Guillermo being a person of recognition in his own country. He’s a composer who doesn’t only have a beautiful soul, he also has a very brilliant mathematical mind. He combines rhythms in this very smart way; but it’s not cold. He doesn’t start making some multiplications or something like that. He finds a very organic way to twist rhythms, like Ligeti used to do.

Anyway, when I moved back to Buenos Aires from New York in 2005, I discovered that none of Guillermo’s albums were out here. The musical community knew Guillermo very well, but the larger audience hadn’t started to follow him. So we started talking about getting his albums released in Buenos Aires, and that happened on my label, Limbo.

EB: And then you actually co-produced his last album, Domador de Huellas [ed note: click on the link to listen to the full album], his record of Cuchi Leguizamón songs. How did that come into being?

FI: Well, first, I want to say something about El Cuchi. He was this amazing folklore composer from Salta, in the north of Argentina. During the 70s, Argentine folklore was very popular throughout the world, and the voice of that era was Mercedes Sosa. A lot of the songs she was singing then were composed by Cuchi Leguizamón, but most people didn’t know that—even here in Argentina.

I actually saw El Cuchi a lot growing up. My family is from Salta and my father, César Isella, is a famous songwriter. He composed the Latin American anthem, and he was also very popular in the 70s. So my family was very close with El Cuchi. We used to have these beautiful music sessions and barbecues—all the things we do in Argentina. I captured him on video once, which I think is the only video that exists of him playing in a concert.

EB: What about El Cuchi as a musician?

FI: As a composer, I’d compare El Cuchi to Thelonious Monk. Both had this very strong base in the roots of the music—in Monk’s case jazz, in El Cuchi’s case folklore—but took it to some other level of complexity. And El Cuchi was a great performer, again like Monk. He didn’t have a perfect technique but a very personal technique.

So when Guillermo came to Buenos Aires to stay, in 2009, we started talking with Sunnyside records about doing a Cuchi album. It's been very intense and very emotional having this amazing, but not very well-known composer reframed in the brilliance of Guillermo and this band.

EB: Do you see this project as being part of some larger trend in Argentine jazz.

FI: Well, there are a lot of crossovers. The thing about Buenos Aires is that it's not so limited in styles. A musician who does rock might be great jazz piano player, and I think that affects the scene. Look at Guillermo. He’s doing this really folkloric music but framing it in contemporary jazz. That’s happening a lot. There’s Escalandrúm. There’s Ramiro Flores. Then there’s this school I have of being open to people like Bjork or Radiohead. Even if we’re doing jazz stuff, we’re trying to get closer to the feel of that music than to, say, standards.

EB: And where do you think that comes from?

FI: Well, part of it comes from following some steps that guys from the US have taken. I could mention the Bad Plus. They’re huge here. People are fascinated by the way they're presenting jazz. They see them, and they start recording jazz with a rock attitude. That's also happening in the compositions. People are composing music they know, but with some other twist. You have a lot of people doing things in electronic folklore like tremolo. Then there’s this style that’s booming here called cumbia digital—it's a mixture of folkloric cumbia and the electronic scene. My friends from Zizek Records are touring all over Europe with digital cumbia right now.

EB: In the US, there’s been this tortured discussion about how jazz is dead, how jazz is losing the young audience...

FI: Here it's for people in their twenties! You were in Pedraza, [a club in a private house], the other day and it was people in their 20s and 30s, but mostly their 20s. The scene is cool, it's a nice play to hang.

EB: When did that kind of scene develop?

FI: We had a really horrible tragedy that happened in a rock club here, [a fire at the Cromañón in 2004 that killed nearly 200 people], and since then all the clubs have been suffering to stay open. So now a lot of the really interesting things are happening in people's houses. They're not legal, but a lot of the scene is happening there, and they're even more packed with people than the regular places.

EB: Who’s in the audience mostly?

FI: I see a lot of students. Now there are five of six good music schools here. There are a lot of people studying here who aren’t thinking only about Berklee. I don't see a lot of people leaving like they did before. And then you have a lot of people in the audience that are coming for the hang, who are coming because it's not pretentious. It's good vibes.

This interview was conducted on December 16, 2009 at Isella's office in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

HBO's Treme returns (and so do NPR's recaps)

When jazz is depicted in mainstream culture, it's usually done with a kind of tone-deafness that makes fans of "the music" grimace. Jazz is "smooth" and "cool" and often represented by a maudlin saxophone performance that sounds more like the intro to George Michael's "Never Gonna Dance Again" than, say, the opening of Coltrane's "Impressions."

That's part of what makes David Simon's New Orleans-set Treme so rare—it's a mainstream show that's deeply sensitive to the lives of working musicians and the subtleties of their art. Treme began its second season on Sunday night, and, like they did last year, NPR jazz blogger-in-chief Patrick Jarenwattananon and WBGO host (and native New Orleanian) Josh Jackson are providing what is likely the most informative TV recap on the interwebs. Their first post of Season 2 opens like this:

PJ: Okay. First, the live music. Why is Batiste visiting his teacher's grave and playing for him? Does that have to do with the fact that it's All Saints Day?

JJ: November 1 is a Holy Day of Obligation still celebrated widely in South Louisiana. That means good Catholics don't bother with the affairs of anyone but God. They attend Mass and visit the tombs of their departed loved ones. It's a nice way to keep life on your mind — laying flowers, lighting votive candles, painting graves ... or, in this case, playing "Buddy Bolden's Blues" for your trombone teacher.

The rest of their conversation follows a similar structure, with Patrick playing a savvier Glaucon and Josh as Bayou Socrates. I'm, admittedly, well behind in my Treme viewing (meaning I have seen Episode 1 and have good intentions to catch up at some point), but I still find Patrick and Josh's Treme analyses to be essential—if somewhat intimidating—reading. (Do you have to be able to pick Lawrence Fields out of a lineup to write about jazz?)

If you're hungry for more NOLA esoterica, check out the full recap archives.

Honey Ear Trio: Something Fierce

This is the golden age of the saxophone trio. I say that not only because the form is now incredibly popular, replacing both the quartet and quintet as the default sax-led unit, but because bands like Fly and the JD Allen Trio have pushed it to new heights. It used to be that all you needed for a sax trio was a big-toned tenorman and a pick-up rhythm section. Now you need to have three distinct voices that together sing with fearful synergy.

The Honey Ear Trio—a new collective of old friends Erik Lawrence, Rene Hart, and Allison Miller—is the latest exponent of this trend, fusing classic gusto with the sophisticated interplay of the modern sax trio. Their debut album, Steampunk Serenade, came out last month, and it's a stellar record—tight and freewheeling, percussive and lyrical.

Juxtapositions are the joy of Honey Ear. On the title track, "Steampunk Serenade," drummer Allison Miller kicks things off with a sharp, metronomic beat that Rene Hart augments with a repeating bass riff and electronic distortion. The music is precise and mechanical. Then Erik Lawrence enters on tenor sax, bellowing long and deep. An operatic voice cries out over the clanking of gears and sprockets. If that's not steampunk, I don't know what is.

Many of the new sax trios make a virtue out of restraint, as if correcting years of saxophone excess. The Honey Ear Trio does not. There are quiet tracks, like "Over the Rainbow" and "Eyjafjallajokull (Icelandic Volcano Hymn)," but even these are upfront in their emotional immediacy. Lawrence, Hart, and Miller have all toured with rock musicians and they've learned well the lessons of that genre. Non-jazz fans often complain that the music is too abstract and too esoteric. No one will say that about the Honey Ear Trio. Their sound is bold, brash, and fierce.

Tonight, the Honey Ear Trio celebrates the release of Steampunk Serenade with a concert at Littlefield in Gowanus. Opening will be Ben Perowsky's Moodswing Orchestra and the Portland-based Blue Cranes, an indie rock-jazz hybrid that shares with Honey Ear a predilection for complex rhythms and rock snarls. (Check out their pulsing anthem "Ritchie Bros.") For $15, you're not going to get a much better night of music.

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Tonight:
The Honey Ear Trio
(w/Blue Cranes and Ben Perowsky's Moodswing Orchestra)
Littlefield
7 p.m.

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Illustration credit: Thanks again to the great Argentine cartoonist Sebastián Scherman (scherman.blogspot.com)

Another Smigly animation that Mingus would've dug

Last summer, the animator and saxophonist Allen Mezquida sent me an installment of his "Smigly" web series that featured the titular hero literally playing his heart out for a hostile audience. I wrote then that the Smigly video reminded me of Mingus's "The Clown," the story of an entertainer who becomes popular only after an accidental turn to slapstick, and who achieves fame only when his act kills him. It's a parable about the dangers of the need to please, how it can corrupt and destroy.

Mezquida's latest Smigly episode, "Kind of Black and Blue," channels Mingus's "The Clown" even more directly: Smigly gets a hundred-thousand YouTube hits and scores a record contract only when he uploads a video of a truck crashing into him. (His regular jazz videos have been drawing in the single digits.) In the end, this one isn't so bleak. Like "The Clown," it's a paean to making it one's own way.

 

Guillermo Klein & Aaron Goldberg's Bienestan

Loyal readers probably don't need to be told again that one of this blog's heroes is the Argentine composer and pianist Guillermo Klein. In early May, Klein arrives back in New York for a week at the Village Vanguard with his 11-piece ensemble, Los Guachos. (They'll be recording a follow-up to 2008's Filtros during that time, as well.) I was planning to hold off on any Argentine jazz blogging until the week before the Vanguard shows, but last week I received word that a new Klein album is set to drop on June 14th.

The record, Bienestan, is a collaboration between Klein and pianist Aaron Goldberg, with crack players Miguel Zenón, Chris Cheek, Matt Penman, and Eric Harland filling out the band. Klein composed and/or arranged all the songs on Bienestan and Goldberg takes on the role of featured soloist. "We were conceiving of it almost in a Gil Evans-Miles kind of way," Goldberg writes in the press release announcing the album.

Needless to say, I'm hugely excited. Klein's contrapuntal duet with keyboardist Esteban Sehinkman—which introduced "Coplas de Regreso" on Klein's last album, Domador de Huellas—executed mind-bending rhythms with maximum tension and propulsive force. Goldberg filled in ably for Sehinkman when Klein came to the Vanguard last year. Those brief moments of piano-Fender Rhodes conversation are enough promise for me. But you might need more. Sunnyside has pre-released two tracks from Bienestan. Here they are:

Burrito:
 

Anita:

Rudresh Mahanthappa's "Gamak": Quartet Relaunch!

Jazz careers (like all American careers) can get broken down into two trajectories. There's the vertical orientation—the career of our company-man fathers—in which a musician gets into a band when he's young and stays there until he's old, working with more or less the same collaborators and gradually honing the subtleties of sound. This is what Bill Evans did and Johnny Hodges did and Brad Mehldau has done. Then there's the horizontal career—the modern freelancer—in which a musician plays in many bands at the same time. None of these bands will play together all that much; and none of them will ever rise to the heights of a great vertical band; but they'll never be short of energy and ideas. Almost every jazz musician today follows this horizontal path. Just as lifetime employment at a single, paternal company has become a relic, lifetime or even consistent multi-year employment in one band has all but gone extinct.

Saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa has recently been a sublime horizontalist. Last year, he put out two albums, Dual Identity and Apex. Both were collaborations with other saxophonists, both featured new bands, both were beautifully realized, neither has launched a band that plays together 100 nights a year. Rudresh's website lists nine "projects" that he leads or co-leads. That's pretty much the definition of a horizontal career.

Tonight at the Cornelia Street Café, Rudresh relaunches vertically, debuting the new Rudresh Mahanthappa Quartet. This is a fresh manifestation of the band that put out Rudresh's earlier records Black Water, Mother Tongue, and Codebook; the band that dominated his musical identity before he fully embraced South Indian Carnatic music, put out Kinsmen and Apti, and got profiled in the New Yorker. The new Rudresh Mahanthappa Quartet features the guitarist David "Fuze" Fiuczynski, a departure from the Quartet's past reliance on pianists to hold down the harmony. "I’ve been blessed to have had such piano powerhouses as Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn perform with me before," Rudresh told me, "but having a guitarist with David’s unique abilities and perspectives will be a big change in thee overall group sound."

The suite the Quartet debuts tonight and tomorrow, "Gamak," continues Rudresh's modern jazz exploration of South Indian musical concepts (and, in the case of "Gamak," Indonesian musical concepts as well). With "Gamak," Rudresh says, "I’m working with quarter-tones and melodic ornamentation in ways that I have not before, especially with regard to composition." It's not a through-composed hour-long piece, but a template for improvisation, exploration. It should be both classic Rudresh and the newer Rudresh rolled into one.

Note: Today marks the beginning of my own collaboration. The drawing of Rudresh above was done by the Argentine cartoonist and humorist Sebastián Scherman. Seba will be contributing illustrations on a regular basis to Inverted Garden, which may finally force me to blog on a regular basis. Please take a sec to visit Seba's website.

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Tonight:
Rudresh Mahanthappa's "Gamak"
The Cornelia Street Cafe
9 and 10:30

Tomorrow:
Rudresh Mahanthappa's "Gamak"
The Jazz Gallery
9 and 10:30

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Illustration credit: Sebastián Scherman (scherman.blogspot.com)

Jason Moran no-shows; Malaby trio triumphs

Two weeks ago, Search & Restore’s “Spontaneous Construction” was a sparsely attended after-hours gig—a night-cap elixir of free jazz after a busy night. The musicians riffed and experimented. It felt more like a closed-door workshop than a formal performance. We were all, as Samir Zarif said, “hanging out.”

The stakes felt much higher last Friday night. A long line snaked down West Third Street thirty minutes before the show was set to begin. Inside, the Blue Note was packed with the “jazz famous”—musicians, critics, and devotees whose collective presence signifies a concert-of-note. This wasn’t going to be a hang-out. It was going to be an event.

The crowds had gathered for one big reason. And that reason wasn’t really to hear the explosive tenorman Tony Malaby, or the brilliant drummer Joey Baron, or the tuba dynamo Bob Stewart. That reason was to hear one of the jazz world’s bona-fide stars: a MacArthur “genius,” Blue Note recording artist, and badass pianist by the name of Jason Moran.

To be fair, I wasn’t there just because of Moran. I was there because the prospect of Moran, Malaby, and Baron playing a late-night free-jazz set for $10 sounded too good to pass up. I’m a sucker for a certain strain of high-brow culture that celebrates the casual work of serious artists. Sure, I’d love to have a dinner at celebrated chef Eric Ripert’s haute-seafood palace, Le Bernardin; but I’d probably be even more excited to have him fix me some fish-and-chips. Likewise, I’ve always enjoyed seeing Jason Moran play with his flagship group, The Bandwagon—the product of ten years of top-flight trio cooking; but when he leads one-off side-projects, there’s a freewheeling creativity that can be even more thrilling. With Malaby and Baron (and the late addition of Stewart), it felt like Moran had the perfect collaborators to create something really special.

He did. And he didn’t even have to show up. The gig was scheduled to start at 12:30. Joey Baron sat down at the drums shortly thereafter looking ready to go. Bob Stewart milled about the audience talking with friends. Tony Malaby ducked in and out of my view. I didn’t see Jason Moran. A little before 1 a.m., Malaby and Stewart stepped onto the stage and started to play. It was beyond casual. Malaby leaned against the piano with the rakish pose of a street-corner loiterer and blew softly through his horn. The audience continued to talk, unsure if this was the beginning of the show or just some live background-music. The club didn’t even dim the house lights.

After about three minutes, it became clear the Malaby-Stewart-Baron trio was performing. The lights went down. Malaby stepped forward. The music took off. The band: instant synergy. Malaby and Stewart engaged in a quick-fire call-and-response—like birds at sunset—and Joey Baron dictated the pace, slowing Malaby down to half-time with a couple hits on the snare, then speeding things up with a few strikes on the toms that soon echoed in Stewart’s tuba. The trio blasted through up-tempo improvisations and slowed gracefully to some wide-open abstractions. They never seemed lost. A middle-aged woman sitting in front of me turned and asked, “you said, they’ve never played together before?”

During all of this, Jason Moran haunted the proceedings—an open question. It quickly became apparent that the trio wasn’t going to leave anyone disappointed. Still, a thought lingered: if Moran walks in here halfway through, hops onto the bandstand mid-song, and lifts this music even higher, the audience is going to go absolutely nuts. It’s going to be as explosive as the moment when Ornette Coleman sauntered onto the Beacon stage at Sonny Rollins’s 80th-birthday concert. No, it’s going to be even more explosive. It’s going to be more like Sonny Rollins not showing up for his own 80th-birthday concert; his bandmates, Christian McBride and Roy Haynes, playing an incredible 45-minute duet alone on stage; and then—just as everyone in the audience is thinking, “well, Sonny didn’t come, but it was still a fucking incredible concert”—Sonny himself bounding into the theater, running through the audience, catching a tenor saxophone thrown to him from off-stage, and digging into the best solo of his career. It was going to be like that.

That didn’t happen. Jason Moran never showed up. He missed what could have been the greatest hero’s welcome of his career. It didn’t matter.

I’d be lying if I said, I wasn’t disappointed; but I’d be foolish to think Moran would have guaranteed a better concert. A sax trio is one of the music’s most flexible forms, a vessel with little harmonic mooring that can convert sheer energy into beauty. Tony Malaby plays the saxophone in torrents; Joey Baron hits the drums like a conductor directs an orchestra; Bob Stewart deploys the tuba’s oomph with warm charisma. Each of them has a big presence. Each of them knows how to listen and how to amplify the simple interplay of three instruments into rich drama. Moran knows this too, but I wonder if his long, percussive keyboard runs wouldn’t have been too much of a good thing. On this night, perhaps Moran’s absence was his best possible accompaniment.

(Updated) Search & Restore's Spontaneous Construction

(Update: Tuba master Bob Stewart will be the fourth member of the Moran, Malaby, Baron quartet for this Friday's Spontaneous Construction.)

A commonly heard lament among the younger jazz crowd is that New York clubs are too expensive, too impersonal, too conservative. They’re designed for an older audience, not the kind of people who are used to paying $10 for SRO indie-rock shows. One of the reasons I loved the jazz scene in Buenos Aires is that it had a distinctly DIY vibe. Fogies in Buenos Aires listen to tango or classical (plenty of non-fogies do too); jazz there is a cutting-edge music and its entrepreneurs tend to be like the wild and crazy Cutaia brothers. One of my favorite venues, Corrientes 2014, was a music studio that occasionally hosted jazz concerts. It felt like listening to music in a friend’s living room.

Since moving back to New York in 2008, I’ve seen the city's DIY jazz scene bloom. The Douglass Street Music Collective in Gowanus is basically Corrientes 2014-New York, a studio rented by several musicians (including the powerhouse baritone saxman Josh Sinton) that doubles as a cheap, informal performance space. The Jazz Gallery has always given off the vibe of a slightly hidden, informal workshop. But the most resolutely “New York jazz” exponent of this kind of music presentation is Search & Restore’s new concert series: Spontaneous Construction. Here, S&R’s Adam Schatz has pulled off the ultimate coup: staging a cheap, midnight free-jazz series at the most commercial and least intimate of New York clubs, Blue Note.

The series is based around a proto-jazz concept: gather together four simpatico musicians who have never played together as a group and let them discover music on the bandstand. Many of the musicians who play have never met each other. It’s a hello, and a handshake, and then an hour of trying to make it work. It’s not a jam session—at jam sessions musicians play standards and try to cut one another—this is a dry run at creating a real group sound. Schatz curates these evenings around one musician and then expands the band from there. Sometimes the chosen musician will recruit the other three players on his or her own. Sometimes it’ll be left up to Schatz.

The night I went, the featured player, Sex Mob drummer Kenny Wollesen, had deferred band-creation duties to Search & Restore, and the resulting group was excellent: accompanying Wollesen were saxophonists Samir Zarif and Jon Irabagon and banjo player Brandon Seabrook. The virgin quartet played for an hour uninterrupted. Some of it didn’t mesh, and some moments—Zarif and Irabagon pulsing on their horns, Seabrook strumming static tension, and Wollesen defining the contours with his sticks—were sublime. After the set, Wollesen looked giddy and winded—like a guy who’d just finished a ten-mile run—and applauded us for sticking around through the madness. On our way out, Zarif—at the bar for a nightcap—thanked us for hanging out. That’s exactly what it was: hanging out with music. I was back in the living room of Corrientes 2014.

This Friday’s Spontaneous Construction is your chance to hang out with the stars. If it’s not the most promising lineup yet, it’s certainly the most famous—a meet-up of the percussive piano genius Jason Moran, the whirlwind tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby, the lyrical drummer Joey Baron, and a TBA bassist. (A great bassist will want to play with these three, guaranteed.) tuba master Bob Stewart!!! (If you weren't already excited about this gig, the inclusion of a tuba dynamo has to have you stoked.) I had other plans on Friday, but after writing these few grafs, I think I know where I need to be. See you there.

Note: A number of readers have asked me why my blogging has slowed to a trickle. One reason is my day job and other writing I've been doing. The other is a new blog project I've launched with two friends: Back At This Table, a semi-anonymous celebration and critique of Charlie Rose and his nonpareil nightly interview show. If I have any readers left, I hope some of you will check it out.

POW!: Tigran Hamasyan, wunderkind or just good?

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Tigran Hamasyan - Solo + Quintet
Tuesday, February 8th at 7
Le Poisson Rouge

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When I started receiving emails from Search & Restore about the upcoming appearance of the Armenian piano whizkid Tigran, I thought it best to approach with extreme caution. Our society is obsessed with prodigies, but especially in jazz, words like "whizkid" often equate to "flame-out." Jazz wunderkinds don't suffer the typical case of too-much, too-soon—even star jazz musicians don't make enough to snort fortunes up their noses—but like overgrown toddlers, they never learn to play well with others. They're all about "me;" but jazz is just too collaborative for a musician to cop that kind of pose. The trajectory is thus: The virtuoso 20-year-old jazz pianist arrives on the scene; a big record company signs him; he tours around Europe with his own band instead of serving an apprenticeship with the masters. His music stagnates into an act.

A few years back, I heard a double bill at Blue Note featuring the precocious pianist Eldar and a far-more-seasoned group with Don Byron and Jason Moran. Eldar played fluently. Byron's Ivey-Divey group dug deep. Their music was as textured and complex as Eldar's was polished and superficial.

I've thought back often on that juxtaposition. Was Eldar merely green? A talent in development? Or was it possible that bland, competent music was all we'd ever get from this greatly hyped pianist? He'd been signed to Sony Classical when he was 17 and, befitting a star, he played (and seems to still play) mostly with his own band. The pianist on the second part of the bill, Jason Moran, also became a star when he was young; but even as a MacArthur "genius" well into his thirties, he spends an awful lot of time working as a sideman. Eldar's career felt like it was probably managed by Sony Classical; Moran's career feels like it's managed by a very quirky man who goes by the name Jason Moran.

Which brings us to Tigran, he of the Eldar-like former-Soviet-republic roots and the preference for one name. (Understandable. Say "Hamasyan" three times fast.) He also shares with Eldar a technique-heavy approach to jazz piano that draws a lot of attention to his dazzling instrumental skill. It's great that Tigran plays so well; but in jazz, a surfeit of virtuosity often masks a paucity of soul. Thankfully, that's not the case with Tigran Hamasyan. On his new record, A Fable, he glides up and down the keyboard like an insufferable show-off, but then he'll hit a chord at an odd angle, cracking the perfection with Monkish jigs and jags. He pulls off two songs based on traditional Armenian melodies; and his propulsive, brooding "A memory that became a dream" reminds me of Guillermo Klein, which, as this blog's archives suggest, I consider very high praise indeed.

Tomorrow night, Tigran will play at LPR, first solo and then in an adventurous quintet featuring Kneebody's Ben Wendel and Nate Wood, musicians well-versed in both a classical approach and the seduction of deep groove. They seem like perfect foils for Tigran, forcing him to move his music beyond pure beauty. Tigran's already a damn fine pianist; I hope he'll keep exploring and become a seriously creative musician.

Tigran with Hoenig, Wendel, and Francois Moutin: