[Dixielandjazz] Is it OKOM? Yes & No

[Steve barbone]

List Mates:

I saw/heard Ran Blake two years ago and was absolutely blown away by his
original renditions of familiar standards. If you ever get a chance to
see/hear him, by all means do so. He is a one of a kind, ORIGINAL.

Is it OKOM? Yes and No. But in either case definitely worth while.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
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February 17, 2005 JAZZ REVIEW | RAN BLAKE NY TIMES

A Master of the Eclectic Stroking the Familiar - By BEN RATLIFF

If there is a manner of playing durable old standards that goes with the
feeling of opening night, spotlights and an alert, recently fed crowd, Ran
Blake's versions suggest how they sound later, inside your head, when you're
lying awake and bedeviled by old regrets.

When Mr. Blake, a pianist, begins a song like "The Midnight Sun" or "Stella
by Starlight" or "Mood Indigo" he suggests its harmonic world with a few
powerful opening chords, revs up the sustain pedal and slips into extreme
displays of rubato and dynamics. He will assault you with one rich,
harmonious chord, a room-filler, then chase it away with the next one, a
quiet, mildly dissonant pianissimo stab with no sustain.

Mr. Blake has been teaching at the New England Conservatory since 1967, in
the department that was once called third stream - meaning the intertwining
of jazz and classical-music philosophy and pedagogy - but is now called
contemporary improvisation. And there is a special-interest feeling to what
he does; in no way is he part of a mainstream movement within jazz. (You
couldn't even call it a niche because nobody has directly followed his
example.) But what he does - using solo-piano technique, imagination and
memory to construct a slightly disturbing dream of American music - is
fascinatingly original.

Standards make up only a fraction of his vast repertory. On Tuesday night in
a rare appearance at Cobi's Place, a small theater in Midtown, he put on a
concert called "Homages, Misfortunes, Infamy," intermittently using a small
group of colleagues and students - a trombonist, two singers, two guitarists
and no drummer or bassist.

He organized the evening into three short sets, and the program included the
three songs mentioned above, as well as some jazz pieces basically known to
deep initiates, gospel and soul songs, film music and melancholy originals.
The composer's name followed the song titles on the program, except where
Mr. Blake himself had written the piece; he indicated his authorship with
the image of a shabby black suitcase.

An expansive and dark imagination, unchecked, can be wearying. But Mr. Blake
also happens to be a master of compression. At one point he played a medley
of four parts: a piano improvisation based on Gunther Schuller's own 12-tone
row; a version of the Sylvers's early 1970's soul hit "Wish I Could Talk to
You"; the theme from the film "Dr. Mabuse"; and "Stratusphunk," a piece of
modal-jazz by George Russell. Come on, give it to him: that's breadth. But
it is also just a little diary of his own interests, and he squeezed the
four pieces so tightly together that it sounded like one short song.

His collaborators on Tuesday were the singers Dominique Eade and Christine
Correa, the eloquent trombonist Joel Yennior, and the guitarists Jonah Kraut
and Dave Fabris. The songs with words came out full of technique and
expression - both these altos seem to love Sarah Vaughan - but with
differences. Ms. Eade sang "Let's Stay Together," the Al Green hit, with
soul; Ms. Correa sang Max Roach and Chips Bayen's "Mendacity," about lying
politicians, with anger. Ms. Eade's soft delivery and Mr. Correa's harsher
one ran together like a double-exposure on Vernon Duke and Ogden Nash's
"Roundabout." 
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