Album Notes

It is all too easy for critics to approach their initial acquaintance with an artist in terms of who x-composer, y-conductor, or z-instrumentalist sounds like. Consider the Philadelphia based pianist-composer-improviser Bob Gold, for example. I’d wager a hefty sum that most critics assigned to review the present disc invariably will slip into a categorizing comfort zone. Within moments after the title track’s easy, welcoming lope gets established, watch the critics’ sensory lightbulbs spell out “Keith Jarrett.” Or take Track Six, “Questions,” where the circular melodies and telling breath pauses evoke the best of George Winston’s “folk-piano.” Once jazz or new age reviewers get wind of Bob Gold’s classical background, they’ll liken his gentle lyricism, delicately wrought textures, and piquant harmonies to Spanish Impressionism, particularly the works of Federico Mompou. Indeed, on his first CD, Departures, Gold offered an ingenuous improvisation upon Mompou’s Musica Callada #1. However, once you check your label-making proclivities at the door, sit down, and listen to this music in the present, you’ll be as caught up as I was in the subtle variety and assiduous through line that informs these seventeen pieces. Much of this has to do with Gold’s impressive command of all things pianistic. He can scamper and scintillate when he chooses, of course, yet fast fingerwork is only one aspect of virtuosity. Notice his wide variety of touch and tone color, his sophisticated pedaling, and his ability to phrase like a singer, as if the piano had lungs and vocal chords, rather than hammers and strings. The late, great classical pianist Claudio Arrau always told his students never to play a melodic line with the same dynamic throughout, because the human voice does not do so. When Gold begins a piece with a sparse melodic line, or simple two-part counterpoint (try Regrets or Summer’s End), his sound manages to fill the room, no matter how loud or soft. As the textures fill out with carefully placed bass notes, gradual shifts in registers, and full-throated chords, the effect is not unlike a cocoon expanding into a butterfly. Having a beautifully regulated concert grand at his disposal doesn’t hurt either! Best as it may be to experience True Love & Other Stories from beginning to end, I can’t help but pinpoint individual movements one surely can appreciate out of context. Check out the marvelous two-handed linear discourse throughout The Brief Dance of 2 Restless Hearts (track 13), or The Geometry of Love (track 16), whose disarming simplicity is offset by its angular melodic curves and canny silences. Or listen to Infinity of a Starlit Night (track 9), where the piano’s highest octaves sing out with a more sustained, mellifluous quality than usual. I also like how Gold intensifies catchy motives with quasi-imitative counterlines (think of Marvin Gaye’s radical double-tracked vocals on What’s Going On) that never sound busy nor, superfluous. First Love (track 3) is a good example of what I mean. Perhaps this is what Gold refers to when he speaks of wanting to get more inside the piano in a conversational way. Fortunately, the conversations always include the listener. Jed Distler Jed Distler is a pianist/composer and artistic director of ComposerCollorative Inc, which can be found at www.composercollab.org His piano transcriptions formed the basis of Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s Coversations With Bill Evans album on London/Decca records, and include books on Art Tatum and Bill Evans. sessions About eight months separated the first and last sessions of improvisation preserved here. Over that time, my children changed in miraculous ways, my family aged, elections passed, and I improvised. We lost someone special in the family, and we grieved and tried to heal. We took several road trips across the country, each trip filling me with fresh images, landscapes and memory. At times, improvisation seemed like an odd combination o