Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Emanuel Ax, piano...
...Jazz piano is so glutted with talent these days that it's hard to get through a week without another new prodigy popping up somewhere. With flying-fingered young virtuosos like Marcus Roberts, Cyrus Chestnut and Eric Reed trying to outdo one another on showy new solo albums and jostling for attention in nightclubs from Bourbon Street to Greenwich Village, competition on the keyboards is more intense than it has been in years. In the midst of all this musical gunslinging, it would be easy to overlook Jacky Terrasson, a newcomer from Paris. But that would be a mistake...
Terrasson, 29, comes to the game with a well-formed sound that relies on inventiveness and vision rather than pure razzle-dazzle. Equipped with a degree in classical piano from the Parisian conservatory Lycee Lamartine, which he topped off with a year of jazz studies at Boston's rigorous Berklee College of Music, Terrasson mixes a thorough knowledge of the jazz canon--from Cole Porter to Duke Ellington to Miles Davis--with a rich harmonic sense and a carefully reined iconoclasm. On his debut album, Jacky Terrasson (Blue Note), he squeezes fresh insight and nuance out of fossilized tunes like...
...storing the enigmatic snapshots of home and business for later use. These are reconstructed scenes, emotion recollected in tranquility. In Room in New York, 1932, it is night; a man reads a paper at a round table, a woman turns away in her own absorption and boredom, touching the piano keyboard with one finger. They are out of synch, and their distance from each other is figured in the simple act of a woman with a shadowed face sounding a note (or perhaps only thinking about sounding it) to which there will be no response...
Haden had religion. He had the history, he had the soul, and as he listened to Jones' serene and supple piano, his eyes closed, his head went back and he started playing a bass line. Without his instrument. Scatting, scampering around the surprising progression of Jones' notes, raising a joyful noise...