Zeitlin at Mezzrow

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“By any measure, Zeitlin's creative output over the past 50 years places him at jazz's creative zenith."

- Andrew Gilbert,JazzTimes

“He is the jazz world’s most visible Renaissance man — a full time practicing psychiatrist, a medical school teacher, and a world class jazz musician.”

- Don Heckman, Los Angeles Times

“Over the years I've had the opportunity to perform in a wide range of venues-from jazz festival stages for thousands of outdoor fans to jazz clubs with fewer than a hundred listeners. And while there is a special excitement in sharing music with a huge crowd, I find myself drawn more to the intimate settings, like Mezzrow. Spike Wilner and his staff have created a unique place for music in a long basement room in NYC's Greenwich Village. He keeps his Steinway Grand in perfect shape; the acoustics are miraculously superb; and people are really listening. During this trio gig with Buster Williams and Matt Wilson, it felt like we were all in it together-players and listeners deeply involved in the emerging music. // This CD marks our 18th year as a trio, and though we don't perform that often, due to the complexities of schedules and the demands of my psychiatric practice and teaching, the music has continued to evolve. Our two nights at Mezzrow were inspiring, and I hope you will enjoy this CD, our 5th album together.”

-Denny Zeitlin, insert notes Denny Zeitlin Live at Mezzrow - Sunnyside Records [SSC 1582] 

If improvisation is the key ingredient in Jazz, you sure get your money’s worth when you listen to pianist Denny Zeitlin’s music. Improvisation is the heart and soul [and mind] of everything Denny’s plays. Even when he states the well-known melody of Gershwin’s The Man I Love on his latest CD for Sunnyside Records [SSC 1582] - Denny Zeitlin Live at Mezzrow -  he can’t resist inflecting it with Zeitlinisms. It’s as though his mind is seeing parallel melodic universes and he is trying to get them all in view at the same time.

I suppose when you have a technique as dazzling as Denny’s and it’s been well-honed over 60 years of performing, technical limitations are no longer an obstacle and you can pretty much put out onto the instrument whatever you are conceptualizing. 

Or as the late pianist Bill Evans put it in a 1979 interview:

“ … it's such an accumulative thing, you know, the ability to manipulate music in some kind of a comprehensive way. And I've really just kind of dealt with it piece by piece over a long period of time, and it seems that at this point in my idiom I enjoy a certain amount of freedom.

I mean, I've come to the point where I have a great deal of enjoyment playing, whereas for many years it was bringing a great deal of concentration to bear — conscious concentration of technical things, you know, having to think a great deal — at the same time trying to leave one part of my mind free to just be the expressive part. Now it's more that I can enjoy almost the total expressive part, and I'm thinking only at less-conscious levels about technical things. So I have arrived at that point, which is very enjoyable, but it's taken a tremendous amount of preparatory years and efforts.”

You have to be careful how you use the word “conscious” around a practicing psychiatrist, which Denny has been for over half a century, so I’ll go with awareness instead because Denny has an almost instantaneous grasp of the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic possibilities of each song or tune that he improvises on such that his ability to interweave between these, three musical elements creates the “texture” or sonority of his music.

Let me explore this concept further by returning to Denny’s approach to the opening track of the CD - The Man I Love.”

The first piano trio version of The Man I Love that I remember hearing in the modern idiom was one done by Erroll Garner. It appeared on a 10” Columbia Records House Party Extended Play album and features Garner’s orchestral piano in a languid out-of-tempo solo piano introduction for the rendering of the first chorus before he switches to a stop time vamp after which bass and drums join in for an uptempo romp that features Erroll’s no-holds barred approach to improvisation with its thumping left-hand accompaniment.

The long rubato introduction and the multi-chorus rush-to-the-finish line Garner track provides a linear or horizontal basis for the texture [sound of/sonority] of his interpretation.

But with Denny, the linear framework is found in Buster Williams’ bass line over which Denny vertically integrates fragments of the original melody, harmonic substitutions and rhythmic displacement so that the improvisation flows and the texture or sonority becomes a continuum of sound. Add to this Matt Wilson’s implied beat on drums along with lots of “coloring” through the use of splash cymbals, rim shots and bass drum accents and the sonic texture of the music begins to wash over and engulf the listener.

Denny, Buster and Matt deconstructed and then reconstructed their way through Monk’s I Mean You in a similar manner along with Dancing in the Dark, Billy Strayhorn’s Intimacy of the Blues and Wayne Shorter’s Paraphernalia. 

The recording’s media release uses phrases such as “accrued intensity,” “esoterically free,” “tricky harmonic and rhythmic changes” to allude to how Denny, Buster and Matt achieved textual variety in the music, and I think that these are all valid phrases to help explain the music on this recording in words [always, an impossible task, at best].

While all the excitement is going on in the faster paced tracks, it makes the slower interpretations of Denny’s original Echoes of a Kiss, Billy Strayhorn’s The Star-Crossed Lovers and quiet bossa nova interpretation Strayhorn’s Isfahan even more appealing by way of contrast.

Denny once described his most comfortable performing venue as the “merger state:” one in which the music, musicians, audience and performance space are almost indistinguishable from one another.

This Mezzrow performance by Denny, Buster and Matt may just be the apotheosis of that state.

To preview the music or for order information go here.