[Dixielandjazz] Bill Charlap Makes Old Numbers, Familiar and Otherwise Sound New

[Steve Barbone]

Interesting review of a pianist who excels in many jazz styles. He brings
something new to the party when playing American Songbook. Well worth a
listen, IMO, if you are in, or visiting NYC.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

Working Hard to Make the Old Numbers, Familiar and Otherwise, Sound New

NY Times Music Review By BEN RATLIFF - May 31, 2007

When jazz is played well enough, it becomes conceptual art without really
trying. There¹s so much there: the idea of improvisation; the idea of what a
song is; the idea of (in some cases) an American style, and the
disappearance or persistence thereof; repertory versus imagination; received
wisdom versus innovation; concision versus the big statement.

All this emerged during the first set by the pianist Bill Charlap¹s trio at
Dizzy¹s Club Coca-Cola on Tuesday. But the music wasn¹t programmatic: None
of these ideas were out on stalks, and the set, 10 songs in a little more
than an hour, didn¹t feel like a lecture.

Mr. Charlap started with two bebop tunes from the 1950s that, generally
speaking, you never hear: ³Odd Number,² by Hank Jones, and ³Simplicity,² by
Al McKibbon. They were clean and fast, and both drew from Bud Powell in the
drive and tension of their melodic lines. They had lightness, character,
inner purpose, strength of design; they were good enough to make you go home
and listen to old records ‹ by Powell, by Sonny Clark, by the young Hank
Jones ‹ to find out if jazz was really like this once.

It was ‹ even better in fact ‹ and the trouble with playing this way is how
to do it without seeming deluded and ultimately fatalistic. Mr. Charlap¹s
gigs get around this problem with hard work and craft, but more important
because he seems less interested in stylistic eras of jazz than its
ever-relevant ideal of melody and efficacy.

The process whereby an American theater song turns into jazz fascinates Mr.
Charlap; he¹s a student of these transformations, and has done it himself,
with songs like George Gershwin and Irving Caesar¹s ³I Was So Young (You
Were So Beautiful),² which came next in the set, arranged simply as a ballad
with brushed drums. Because the song is basically unknown to jazz audiences,
he could pour his own style into it, trickling out his phrases, making them
sound like vocal runs.

But with two better-known songs, ³The Way You Look Tonight² and ³It¹s Only a
Paper Moon,² Mr. Charlap took pains to make a statement with form. The first
was almost comically fast and frenetic, with layers of different tempos for
piano and drums. And the second was super-slow, a set piece of
counterintuition. The song almost lost its recognizability and identity, but
that was the point. He leaned into his experiment, taking the harmony apart
and putting a quiet semi-gospel arrangement on the song¹s ending.

In almost every case Mr. Charlap, with the bassist Peter Washington and the
drummer Kenny Washington (they¹re not related), used an arrangement to
bracket songs at the beginning and end, or to aerate them in the middle. His
arrangements are usually built on short unison passages, and they never use
a splattering drum fill when a single hit will do. And they¹re almost
archaic. (They didn¹t seem so much this way 10 years ago, when Mr. Charlap¹s
trio was just beginning, and Tommy Flanagan, his supreme stylistic model,
was still alive and working.) But they¹re superbly scaled; they¹re of a
piece with the concision and craft of the rest of the music.

Simultaneous with the last piano chord of ³It¹s Only a Paper Moon,² Kenny
Washington struck the middle of his cymbal once with the handle of his wire
brush. In the context of the set, it was enough, and a lot.

The Bill Charlap Trio continues through Sunday at Dizzy¹s Club Coca-Cola,
Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, 60th Street and Broadway;
(212) 258-9595, jalc.org.