Search - Ran Blake :: Sonic Temples

An intriguing departure

N. Dorward | Toronto, ON Canada | 08/11/2002

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Pianist Ran Blake is perhaps usefully thought of in the tradition of American mavericks--Ives, Partch, Nancarrow, Cage, but also Thelonious Monk & Joe Maneri. He has famously preferred to record without conventional accompaniment--he usually performs solo, or in duet with a singer or saxophonist. He has a peculiarly bleak soundworld, strongly influenced by film scores, Bartok, Messiaen, Stan Kenton, but also incorporating ragtime and world musics (Catalan folksongs are a regular component of his repertoire).Blake's friend Gunther Schuller encouraged him to make this two-CD set on which, unusually, he's in a conventional piano trio situation, & the material is mostly familiar jazz standards. His accompanists are Gunther's sons Ed and George, & in many ways the album really deserves a joint credit to Ed Schuller: he's strongly featured on most of the tracks, Blake sometimes entirely ceding the spotlight. Ed's wife Nicole guests on 3 tracks, playing alto saxophone--it's a nice touch, especially on the piano-sax duet "You Don't Know What Love Is".It's an interesting album, though I think that it doesn't quite rank with Blake's best. The addition of the rhythm section doesn't exactly make the music swing for the most part--a lot of the tracks are as tortuously slow as any Blake solo disc. Blake can sound like you're hearing him from a far distance, because of his penchant for mixing very loud, ringing chords with almost inaudible cloudy ones. That said, there's nothing here that is less than good, & there are some highlights. The revisiting of "The Short Life of Barbara Monk" (Blake has recorded this piece over & over again over the years) is especially good, & I'm struck by how the influence of Mingus is apparent in its chord changes & multiple-section structure. (The music sometimes bears an obvious debt to Mingus & also to Paul Motian, which is probably the Schullers' doing to some extent--Ed was the bassist for Motian's group in the early 1980s, & George's drumming clearly owes a big debt to Motian.) There's a nice snapshot version of "Laura" (the one solo track); & there's a superb rendition of Gunther Schuller's "Night Music", a third-stream blues which was last recorded by Eric Dolphy (see _Vintage Dolphy_).Blake fans will enjoy this. Those who haven't heard the great man before might however want to start instead with his work with Jeanne Lee, his solo discs (e.g. his Monk disc _Epistrophy_), his Gershwin disc for Hat Art, or _The Short Life of Barbara Monk_, which is a marvellous quartet date with Ricky Ford."