The third great piano trio album that we have heard in as many days and just as convincing as the soon to be released Confidences and just issued Live at Birdland. But so different to both.
Memoir doesn't grow from a passionate Mulgrew Miller and Bruce Barth influenced base as Confidences does. Nor does it revert to Chick Corea or Wayne Shorter as so inspired on Live at Birdland.
Instead it has the most intimacy of the three. Mainly originals of the 72-year-old American pianist Michael Wolff added in there's an agile, imaginative treatment from Wolff of the Bill Carey and Carl Fischer 1940s classic - right at the end - 'You've Changed'. Immortalised by Billie Holiday on Lady in Satin (Columbia, 1958) the Wolff approach captures the song's essence in a different way. It lands a caressingly textured world away from how on Never on Sunday (Argo, 1961) Ramsey Lewis came to the song. In other words Wolff is not at all as under the influence of Erroll Garner as Lewis.
Wolff, the former musical director of the Arsenio Hall TV talk show is here with bassist Ben Allison and with drummer Allan Mednard.
We loved Wolff's 2021 Live at Vitellos that featured Mark Isham and this is every bit as good. Beginning with a gentle lope on 'Left Out' the album moves up a gear emotionally on the beautiful 'Afternoon' - such touch and the right hand voicings punctuated by Mednard pull on a heartstring.
Elsewhere there's a tribute to Joe Zawinul with a sense of almost Manolo Badrena-like percussiveness from Mednard on 'Zawinul'. And on the opening few bars of 'On My Mind' - Wolff switches to electronic keys on this track to unearth a wonderfully colouristic and evocative seam. The laidback and agreeably weary 'Sad Clown' also makes use of the electric keys.
'No Lo Contendré' ('No Contest') has the best busy kind of counterpoint running between Wolff and Allison on the album. But 'Wheel of Life' enters more of a Bill Evans-type world. Wolff's artistry shares some common ground with Evans' world certainly for that underplayed sense of tristesse and wistful - inspirational - melancholia. An album where no one gets blasted or distracted by the noise of a million inputs.
Commentaires