Roberta Piket Trio
Love And Beauty
© 2007 Roberta Piket (700261202068)
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The adventurous new CD from Roberta Piket, Ratzo Harris and Billy Mintz featuring nine originals and standards including Cole Porter’s “So In Love” & a daring arrangement of the classic “Up, Up and Away”. With special guest tenor saxist Rich Perry.
tracks
- 1 I'm My Everything
- 2 For Uncle Harvey
- 3 Up, Up and Away
- 4 Flight
- 5 Love and Beauty
- 6 Destiny
- 7 Alone, Alone
- 8 Claude's Clawed
- 9 So In Love
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In “Love and Beauty” Roberta Piket takes the piano trio format to new and exquisite heights. Supported with interactive simpatico by bassist Ratzo Harris and drummer Billy Mintz, Piket soars through a program of engaging originals and standards that clearly defines her as one of the best jazz pianists of her generation.
Piket’s richly evocative music provokes strong responses. At one level, these responses are physical as well as spiritual. Quite literally, this is music that moves both body and soul. At another level, her music elicits associations and memories that while personal also connect to the culture at large.
Piket’s trios have included some of the best players in her home town of New York City. Still, the group heard here featuring Harris and Mintz is something special. With its shared and deeply felt history as a working ensemble, there is a high level of interpersonal musical trust that gives the trio’s open-ended improvisations a compelling immediacy.
The project also reflects a new level of confidence in Piket’s playing. There’s an assurance in which her considerable technique is focused on the music’s larger needs. Abetted by Harris and Mintz, Piket’s explorations of “love and beauty” reveal the deep passion of her magnificent musical obsession.
Piket, referring to her decision to use the Billy Mintz original for the project’s title, says: “Today, invoking words like ‘love’ and ‘beauty’ is almost rebellious given the politics of division and war which are so pervasive.”
The concept of “beauty” as used by classical aestheticians who connected it to “the sublime” gets to the heart of what makes Piket’s work so powerful. While drawing on the legacy of Bill Evans’ great trios, Piket has tapped into a kind of free-ranging spontaneity that lifts all. Though it‘s a dangerous game, Piket and her trio thrill us time and again by dancing fearlessly and freely at the edge.
Piket’s “I’m My Everything,” based loosely on Harry Warren’s “You’re My Everything” (and which she previously recorded on Live at the Blue Note), is a rousing opener. Her solo starts with a two-handed contrapuntalism that evolves into sizzling post-modern jazz. Switching from brushes to sticks, Mintz turns up the heat, as Harris stokes the fire from below.
Written in memory of family member Harvey Nelson, Piket’s poignantly wrought “For Uncle Harvey” is at once introspective and quietly celebratory. Here, Piket’s understated, almost minimalistic approach stirs feelings of love and beauty that communicate to all. Note Mintz’s subtle brushwork underneath.
Piket’s exuberant reframing of Jimmy Webb’s “Up, Up and Away” is a trio tour de force. Here, the metric flow of the Fifth Dimension hit is dramatically deconstructed into seething theme-and-alteration episodes that flow seamlessly through several meters. Mintz’s dramatic drum solo near the end begins as an experiment in colors, then crescendos into an explosion of pure energy.
The first of Mintz’s three originals is “Flight.” The trio engages the tune’s formidable, Trane-esque harmonic challenges at a brisque tempo. Among the highlights are Harris’ jaw-dropping solo, a remarkable duet by Piket and Mintz, and the trio’s deeply grooved sense of swing.
Mintz’s “Love and Beauty” is a haunting ballad showcasing the trio’s unabashedly romantic side. With its freely inflected meditations, its brooding heart-felt passions unfold with appealing directness. Another of its assets is Harris’ searingly intense arco melodic statement.
“Destiny” includes the project’s biggest surprise in that it introduces Piket as a vocalist. “I’ve always been a closet singer,” she shares. “My mother was a singer. And recently I’ve been singing as well as playing on gigs for senior citizens. The over-90 set,” she offers with a smile, “is a very forgiving demographic.”
Mintz’s ballad, whose lyrics include “Our love, so blind our hearts can’t see…Only love is destiny,” unreels with a smoldering quality reminiscent of Hollywood’s film noir classics of the Forties. Piket’s plaintive, nearly vibrato-less voice is pitch perfect, musically and dramatically. Adding to the noirish aura is Rich Perry whose hard-boiled yet tender tenor sax is the perfect foil to Piket’s voice.
Piket’s “Alone Alone” is an inspired tip-of-the-hat to the singular Lennie Tristano. Based on the standard “Alone Together,” Piket’s bracingly angular line is an effective springboard for the trio’s individual and collective forays. There’s a sense of flow that grabs hold and never lets go. Included is an ear-grabbing exchange between Piket and Mintz in which the drummer’s melodic as well as rhythmic gifts take center stage. Harris’ solo shows off a melodic side of his virtuosity.
In “Claude’s Clawed”, the trio’s free-flowing trajectories orbit with audacity. Inspired by her cat Claude but written specifically as a challenge to her bandmates, the pianist’s advanced harmonies set the stage for pantonal explorations both in and out of time.
Cole Porter’s “So In Love” is an effective curtain-closer. Set up as a beguine-like lament with Harris’ arco bass and Mintz’s mallets, Piket limns Porter’s heartbreaking melody with a longing that is painfully beautiful. Here, as elsewhere, Piket’s perfect use of space boldly sets off her dramatic and broad brushstrokes.
Love and Beauty, by any measure, is a notable achievement. For Piket and her trio, it is a benchmark attesting to the group’s ever evolving artistry. For listeners, Piket’s trio offers a passion and spontaneity accessible to all. There’s something here for everyone (including 90-year-old senior citizens)!
Dr. Chuck Berg, Film-Media Studies, University of Kansas
reviews
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Love and Beauty
author: Gary WilliamsA very beautiful recording. I have Msa. Piket's earlier CDs, and in "Love and Beauty" I can hear growth in her playing and in her composition skills. Definitely a "keeper!"
"Love and Beauty is a work of such sustained unity and clarity that you can ente
author: -JazzTimes, May 2007Roberta Piket is a gifted pianist and composer who leads one of the most accomplished and idiosyncratic piano trios in jazz. (Its other two members are Ratzo Harris, an eloquent six-string bass soloist, and Billy Mintz, a melodic, perversely quiet, oddly propulsive drummer who writes cool songs). Piket’s musical erudition never calls attention to itself. Her reharmonization of “You’re My Everything” is extremely clever, but its point is to provide dynamic blowing changes. “Alone, Alone” is a rethinking of “Alone Together” and also a Lennie Tristano tribute. Piket acknowledges Tristano in her intricate two-handed lines with no chords and her accentual displacements, yet sounds like herself. “Up, Up and Away” is another highly inventive recomposition. The Fifth Dimension never dreamed of all those measures in 5/4 and 6/4. But the most striking Piket transformation of a standard is “So in Love.” It is achingly slow, piecing out the melody in careful, poignant testimony. Of Piket’s four originals here, the most moving is a simple, loving eulogy, “For Uncle Harvey.” Billy Mintz’s “Destiny” introduces two new sounds to the album that fit within its atmosphere: Rich Perry’s plaintive tenor saxophone and Piket’s vibratoless, waiflike singing voice. Love and Beauty is a work of such sustained unity and clarity that you can enter it anywhere. If you are an impatient person pressed for time, start with “So in Love.” Piket will take it from there. -Thomas Conrad
Terrific, Assured Jazz
author: Ed GoodsteinA very strong set I think. Piket & her trio are consistently inventive and interesting, incorporating many 'mainstream' ideas into a progressive framework. Cool original compositions that seem like classics, and nice reworkings of "So in Love" & (surprise!) "Up Up and Away." She has light fingered dynamics recalling Ahmad Jamal at times, yet push and dramatic elements too that also still swing elegantly and nice rhapsodic elements. I like her other albums as well-- this one one of her best.
"deeply swinging, intelligent, two-fisted pianist..."
author: Seattle Times (Paul deBarros)A favorite of Marian McPartland, Piket is a deeply swinging, intelligent, two-fisted pianist.
"stellar trio "
author: Contra Costa Times (Andrew Gilbert)The title of pianist Roberta Piket's new CD is "Love and Beauty," and that pretty much captures the vibe of the stellar trio documented on the album. Featuring bassist Ratzo Harris, best-known for his long association with the superlative pianist Kenny Werner, and drummer Billy Mintz, a brilliant player who has toured and recorded with jazz giants such as Lee Konitz, Charles Lloyd and Alan Broadbent, the trio has honed a supple, tremendously flexible improvisational approach while exploring a repertoire of obscure American Songbook gems, little-known pieces by Herbie Hancock and Bill Evans, and Piket's heady original tunes.
"Constantly curious..."
author: Los Angeles Times (Don Heckman)How can you not be curious about a pianist who writes tunes with titles such as "I'm Back in Therapy and It's All Your Fault" and "I'm My Everything?" But Piket has a lot more to offer than whimsical song titles. Constantly curious, she has released a series of recordings probing across the landscape from retro-mainstream to free jazz...