[Dixielandjazz] A Jazz Breath of Fresh Air

[Stephen G Barbone]

January 21, 2010 - NY Times - By Ben Ratliff

Pushing Back: Jazz Notes Against the Current


The young pianist Aaron Diehl is putting his talent against the odds.  
What he’s up to with his trio, which played at Smalls on Tuesday  
night, isn’t new in the temporal sense or “new” in the art-movement  
sense, which is to say it isn’t confrontational or puzzling.

It was a set that sounded as if it had arrived in a time capsule from  
before the 1960s game changers of jazz piano, Herbie Hancock and McCoy  
Tyner, and that’s strange coming from a musician in his mid-20s. It  
was clean, delicate, highly arranged and not outwardly virtuosic. In  
some ways, perhaps, he wasn’t pleading his case.

But that made you listen a bit harder. In his trio, with the bassist  
David Wong and the drummer Quincy Davis, you can recognize how much  
he’s studied, but he doesn’t feed his hard work back to you with any  
stress. He likes chamber dynamics. You hear a lot of Duke Ellington,  
particularly the quiet Ellington of the record “Piano Reflections.”  
You hear a lot of John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet. (The trio  
played a version of the quartet’s 10-minute “Ronde Suite” in its  
entirety — this in tiny Smalls, on a Tuesday night, at 7:30.) You also  
hear a little bit of stride piano, a style he doesn’t use often enough  
to make it a parlor trick or a crutch. And you’re also struck by more  
general qualities: the music’s counterintuitive combination of hard  
swing and restraint, Mr. Diehl’s careful keyboard touch, and space,  
lots of space.

He started with Ellington’s “Sucrier Velours,” from “The Queen’s  
Suite,” moved through George Shearing’s “Conception,” and then the  
band played its version ofMozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A, organized  
into a jazz waltz. It had a question-and-answer structure running  
through it, as did Mr. Diehl’s own song “Tag You’re It,” which also  
included an agitated, race-away drum solo and a close tangle between  
piano and drums. A version of Thelonious Monk’s “ ‘Round Midnight” was  
the lightest of the soufflés: the rowdiest it got was Mr. Davis  
tapping his ride cymbal in a habanera beat during the song’s bridge.  
Everything had its calm place; nothing, structurally, was left to  
chance.

The trumpeter Dominick Farinacci joined the band at the end of the  
set, and in Monk’s “Four in One” the music got a little more muscled.  
Mr. Farinacci is a clear, declarative, forceful player, and the two  
musicians went at it without a rhythm section for a while. Mr. Diehl  
had to hit the keys a little harder and more percussively too. And  
when Mr. Farinacci soloed, Mr. Diehl accompanied, leaving fabulous  
acres of silence between chords.