Ran Blake - Complete Recordings on Black Saint & Soul Note

An album by pianist/composer/educator Ran Blake is unlikely to be a bad one or a dull one for that matter, so this is a steal: six recordings for the cost of two (or three) from the distinguished Italian jazz label Black Saint. Not all are equally satisfying but all have moments of musical reward.The first, Improvisations, finds Blake in duet with his colleague at the New England Conservatory of Music, Jaki Byard. Both were instrumental in consolidating the jazz music education program there, one of the best in the country. Byard helped establish and chaired the Afro-American Music program and Blake was co-founder/chair of the Third Stream Music department. It’s a playful album featuring two harmonically sophisticated and playfully inventive musicians. The musicians are split, one on the left, the other on right channel. When I started listening to it and making judgments on the playing, I misremembered who played on what channel. I was sure that Ran was on the left channel and Jaki on the right, and their playing matched up to my preconceptions of them. Both took risks and both played very well but Jaki, known for his puckish musical humor and for his penchant for outré’ chorded passages, was the jauntier and less constrained of the two, and Ran the more formal. The problem is that I was wrong. On this album, Blake takes more risks, is more openly humorous, and Byard, though a risk taker too, is the staider of the two. It’s relative, of course, because both players are having a good time here and each player’s playing strikes sparks in the other’s playing. Not all of the compositions on the album are memorable but the two players’ playing on them is a wonder to hear. The most musical of the selections are revisitings of standards: they are also the most conservatively played. The originals are mainly vehicles the musician use to have fun with.Duke Dreams is a solo album, reworkings of tunes by Ellington and Strayhorn. The reworkings are often radical but they retain the pensive quality of the originals and also, behind the drastic revisions of chords and notes and tempo, enough of the original melody framework to give the listeners a place of comparison. It’s a very good album, along with Short Life of Barbara Monk, the best in this lot.I don’t know quite what to make of Blake’s union with soul sax player Houston Person on four of the cuts on Suffield Gothic. Blake has done this before, notably with tenorist Ricky Ford on Barbara Monk and Clifford Jordan on Masters from Different Worlds. In all three cases, the tenor sax player provides a kind of earthiness and drive often absent from Blake’s deliberately slow, harmonic-driven, piano musings. Person plays well on this album, and he has one solo outing which is formidable, but Blake’s work on his solo cuts, and his backing for Person on the other cuts on this album, somehow don’t cohere. It’s like two players, both playing well, but headed in different directions.Short Life of Barbara Monk is a minor masterpiece. The addition of the other players on some cuts enriches the blend. The pieces on this album don’t cohere to make a unified statement but they work together somehow anyway. Maybe it is just that Blake is an interesting composer, arranger and player, and the album opens up to us how interesting his music can be. Aside from the centerpiece “Short Life” (7:24 minutes), there are two very short (under a minute each) takes of an Eastern European melody, “Una Matica de Ruda,” that I think Blake has recorded elsewhere and an interesting rendition of Stan Kenton’s old warhorse, “Artistry in Rhythm” (5:54 minutes). Everyone plays well here.Epistrophe is Blake’s take on grand master Thelonious. Thirteen of the seventeen cuts are Monk tunes straight out. (“Epistrophe” is played thrice, at the beginning, the middle and the end.) The other four cuts are standards all associated with Monk from his solo albums. We know from Robin Kelley’s biography of Monk that Blake idolized him when Blake was a late teenager, and there are commonalities as well as variances between Monk’s and Blake’s piano playing, especially Blake’s playing of the standards. He’s got a hard touch but monk had a harder one. When Monk hit the keys, he somehow produced slightly sharp overtones that created irresistibly effective discord, not full disharmony, just the edge of it. Blake consciously uses disharmony but it never seems as spontaneous as Monk’s nor as bluesy. Both stick to the melody, moving off it but returning and stating it over and again. And both favor slow playing tempos. But Blake’s playing never, or at least seldom, jumps off the tracks for a bit like Monk’s does, creating a pleasingly irregular rhythm ride through the tune. In short, Blake’s rhythms move forward evenly, Monk’s rock back and forth slightly, and very effectively. Still, this is a good album. I find it a bit cold but then, I find Blake’s playing in general a bit cold, I think because he plays so slowly and it sounds so considered.Unmarked Van, a tribute to Sarah Vaughan, features a number of the songs with which she was associated. Vaughan was the most musicianly of her generation of singers and so is a good choice for Blake, who can play with heart but more often plays with head. He is a singularly intelligent soloist but not always one who warms the listener’s heart and pulse in the listening. For the most part, though, this is a lovely album which reflects credit on both honoree and honorer. Italian drummer Tiziano Tononi joins Blake on three cuts and has a solo cut of his own on one. On the one cut with Blake he plays drums, on the other two primarily bongos. I left the album wondering why he was included.That’s nothing, though, compared to my reaction to the presence of guitarist David “Knife” Fabris on Indian Winter (the newest of the albums, recorded in 2005). With the exception of one cut, a reshaping of “Georgia on My Mind,” I found his presence intrusive rather than complementary. In sound (electric and cutting, for the most part) and approach (memories of Hendrix), he sounds like an interesting player, but not one to play with Blake.So, quick ratings for all six albums, using a five star scale:• two fives: Duke Dreams and Short Life of Barbara Monk• two fours: Epistrophe and Unmarked Van (maybe a tad less than four)• one 3-1/2: Improvisations• and Indian Winter bringing up the rear with a two to 2-1/2.

How can you go wrong with this box set? Ran Blake is the best living jazz pianist today. Wonderful they put this out. I only wish the record company gave the artists a cut or consulted them before trying to bank off them. Kind of lame on their part. Nice to see guitarist Knife Fabris and saxophonist Ricky Ford are on here too.

I wanted a CD of the fabulous (IMO ) - The Short Life of Barbara Monk -album . . . This box set includes such a thing . . Beautiful piano from Ran Blake . Fine work from the rest of the group .