Search - Enrico Pieranunzi, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian :: Special Encounter

Special enjoyment . . .

Jan P. Dennis | Monument, CO USA | 05/22/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

". . . that's what's on tap for the discerning listener.



We've been blessed with a wealth of gorgeous piano trio sessions lately. One thinks of the Waslewsk/Kurkiewicz/Miski Trio, Alan Pasqua's My New Old Friend, Tord Gustavsen's The Ground, Frank Kimbrough's Lullabluebye, Shelley Berg's Blackbird, E.S.T.'s Seven Days of Falling, Don Friedman's My Favorite Things, and lots of others, too numerous to name. This, my friends, is among the very best, if not the absolute best of the lot.



These three players, leader Enirco Pieranunzi (piano), Charlie Haden (bass), and Paul Motian (drums) connect with a depth and magic found only among the greatest practitioners of the jazz art. All performers at the very pinnacle of accomplishment, they converse and interact with an ease and sharpness of music wit that shines forth from the first notes out of the speakers. Some groups work by virtue of new territory they carve out; some work by sheer exuberance and vitality. These guys excel at the subtlest but most profound musical give-and-take. They listen with uncanny precision, they answer with deft commentary, building on each other's statements, expanding, clarifying, moving musical speech in a new and fruitful direction.



There's a certain drollness in Pieranunzi's playing, almost sounding lazy if it weren't so scalpel-precise. The way he dances around time, melody, harmony, dynamics lulls the unwary into, perhaps, thinking he's a slacker, not paying attention. But when he wraps it all up with a long-withheld, teased-out, perfectly structured phrase, who's the one with egg on his face, Mr. Performer or Mr. Listener?



A note about Paul Motian. I admit, he DOES take a little getting used to, especially in such a sonically spare setting. His brushwork, were it not so idiosyncratically brilliant, would be perverse. Getting perhaps the greatest assortment of timbres from the sparsest materials, he's the absolute world champ at minimalist impressionist drumming. Charlie Haden strikes me as his perfect foil. An iconoclast of the first water himself, his pulse-based playing, strange-but-inevitable note placement, impossibly resonant tone, and weird swing perfectly ground this session.



A varied program of mostly nocturnally tinged ballads--three standards plus five Pieranunzi and three Haden originals--the compositions with their elegance and elegiacism vault what was already an extraordinary session into the stratosphere. If you have any affinity at all for this kind of music, this is most definitely a disc you will want check out."

Nice stuff, but not a lot of character

N. Dorward | Toronto, ON Canada | 06/05/2005

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Pieranunzi is a top-notch pianist in a post-Bill Evans, post-Herbie Hancock vein, but without a lot of distinguishing features to set him apart. The results here are beautiful & satisfying jazz but not especially memorable. The album was planned as a ballad session, & after the first couple tracks ("My Old Flame" & "You've Changed") I was fearing this would be a wallow, but Pieranunzi's originals are altogether more sharp-edged & distinctive, especially the angular melody of "Secret Nights" & the tribute to Paul Motian "Mo-Ti". Charlie Haden's three originals are as you'd expect from him a lovely but sentimental lot, the best being "Nightfall", which seems to be a close cousin to Bill Evans' "Turn Out the Stars" (the same initial gesture: a repeated simple phrase over two progressively more downbeat cadences).



If you're looking for a lovely piano trio album, look no further. But it's not exactly an album that stands out from the mass of accomplished piano trio albums out there--I'm inclined to say, why bother with this when you can get an album by someone like Kenny Barron or Fred Hersch which might have a little more pep & surprise to it?"

Magical encounter

ToothSaver | Tel Aviv , Israel | 01/02/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Magical , melodic, imaginative, jazz at its best - for day drive or night reading, for a good drink or love making"