Standard setting

A few weeks ago, I was drunkenly telling my buddy Carl Abernathy I didn't need any more "standards" CDs, so the next day I bought "Written in the Stars" from Blue Note with pianist Bill Charlap and his trio, Washingtons Peter and Kenny on bass and drums respectively, playing, you guessed it, a bunch of standards.

What the heck, I didn't have anything with Charlap leading and it turns out there's nothing still about "In the Still of the Night," which the pianist and Peter Washington improvise with great alacrity, on this disk. While these may be standards, they're not the standards you tend to hear on every other standards disk, say, "Summertime." The guys make a touching ballad of "The Man That Got Away," for instance. That quiet interlude and one or two others aside, much of what they do is propelled by an undercurrent of advanced swing, like "Where Have You Been?" and "Lorelei," which are swinging and bluesy at the same in the classic mold of Count Basie, Jay McShann and other Kansas City greats.

Charlap isn't as far toward the outside as I like my favorite current piano players, Jean-Michel Pilc and Brad Mehldau, for example. But he's certainly a beautiful, creative, intricate and proficient pianist and the misters Washington are perfect teammates for him. It's something like listening to Oscar Peterson with Ray Brown and a drummer instead of a guitarist and playing that good, even standards, is hardly, well, standard.