Listening to Jobim's "Stone Flower" yesterday morning got me on a piano trio jag (although "Stone Flower" isn't a trio disk, go figure) that started with Bill Evans and "Sunday at the Village Vanguard" (great music for a rainy A.M., even a Saturday) and progressed into Jean-Michel Pilc's "Welcome Home." Pilc has been one of my favorite younger-lion jazz pianists since I bought his CD "Cardinal Points" on a flier a few years ago and then caught him live, and solo, at a little club in Paris. (His solo disk "Follow Me" is a good approximation of what I heard at that performance.)
He's far more percussive and the edges on his playing are much sharper than the smoothness of Evans and Jobim in both areas. Pilc also makes more overt use of avant-garde and classical elements, the latter of which Evans uses extensively but in a more integrative fashion. Pilc often flashes a familiarity with stride, a quality I don't hear in Jobim and Evans. If anything, he's more like McCoy Tyner, though quite individual in his sound I think. I particularly dig "Welcome Home," on which he mixes his own compositions with reconstructions of an interesting variety of standards and not-so-standards, from "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good" to "Giant Steps," along with "Scarborough Fair."
I slipped over the edge and finished the session off with "Elf Bagatellen" from Free Music Production, Germany, and Alexander von Schlippenbach, a piano trio disk on which Evan Parker's saxes replace the bass. I remember listening to this the first time driving home from Chicago after I had purchased it at the Jazz Record Mart and thinking I'd wasted 20 bucks. It's one of those things like Ornette Coleman's "Body Meta" or Sam Rivers' "Crystals" that had to grow on me. Now I find all three intellectually, and viscerally, exciting whenever I listen to them.
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