Get Up And Go (Jazz Family)
Vadim Neselovskyi Trio
Released April 21, 2017
DownBeat Four-and-a-Half-Star Review
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_l9xm7GLlnqdewPicbJmiFXzNUd9Yc0nuM
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/57HmG1TgNu1Qoch8U1fEcB?si=NKAUXIs_Tgy-RZUX23KKyg
About:
Though he left the country more than 20 years ago, returning home to his native Ukraine is always a special occasion for pianist/composer Vadim Neselovskyi. His summer 2014 performance at the country’s largest jazz festival, Alfa Jazz, took on an added poignancy, however, because of the political turmoil afflicting the nation. Having assembled a trio especially for the occasion, Neselovskyi forged a strong and meaningful bond with his bandmates – bassist Daniel Loomis and drummer Ronen Itzik – through this act of musical communion with his homeland.
That deeply
emotional bond can be felt and heard throughout Get Up and Go, Neselovskyi’s
first trio recording. The album, due out May 19, 2017 via Jazz Family and
Neuklang Records, shows off the range of emotions this trio is able to summon,
as well shining a spotlight on Neselovskyi’s compositional gifts, allowing him
to conjure a remarkable symphonic sweep from such limited instrumentation.
When Neselovskyi and his trio arrived at the Alfa Jazz festival that June day,
they had planned an upbeat, playful set appropriate to an open-air summer
festival. Only ten minutes before they were to take the stage, the promoter
announced that a Ukrainian military plane had been shot down by separatists and
that the entire country was in mourning. Neselovskyi sat down at the piano,
faced not with a crowd of eager revelers but with a somber audience holding
candles, tears streaming down their faces.
Changing the program on the fly, Neselovskyi opened the set with a solo
performance of “Krai,” a poignant piece that quotes from an Orthodox
prayer, the raw feeling of which he replicates here. The trio followed with
“Get Up and Go,” the piece that became the new album’s title track.
Though the phrase connotes a feeling of energy and ambition in English,
Neselovskyi was unaware of the idiom when he originally composed it (the song
was originally recorded on Gary Burton’s Next Generation album).
In the composer’s mind, the phrase refers to a soldier, wounded on the
battlefield and lying on the ground, who wills him or herself to rise and carry
on. The tune’s air of quiet but forceful resilience proved especially resonant
in the circumstances in which the artists and audience alike found themselves
that tense summer day. “The human soul is a complicated thing, and we’ll
probably never understand how it works, but I can say that I have a special
connection to the place where I was born,” Neselovskyi says. “Every
time that I visit Ukraine or Russia, I think I’m subconsciously searching for
this feeling of home that I had when I was growing up, but it cannot come back.
That concert was a moment when I felt that I was together with my people, as
strongly together as maybe only tragedy can bring people.”
It was also a spontaneous shift in plans of which only a smaller ensemble would
have been capable. Given his taste for employing an orchestral palette in his
work, Neselovskyi had long resisted leading a trio. “I think of myself
primarily as a composer, and I always felt like my music naturally required all
these extra layers that a piano trio could not give,” he explains. Having
gleaned a wide-ranging grasp of orchestration from working in both orchestral
writing and extensive solo performances in the wake of his solo album Music for
September, Neselovskyi began to change his thinking, coming completely around
upon discovering his significant chemistry with Loomis and Itzik.
“Suddenly I started to see possibilities for how a trio could sound like
an orchestra.”
Not all of
the music on Get Up and Go echoes the mournful mood of the Alfa Jazz
performance. The album begins in the sort of playful mood that the trio
originally had in mind that day, with the joyfully spiraling “On a
Bicycle,” inspired by 20th-century Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
“San Felio” evokes even sunnier climes, sparked by a vacation on the
Mediterranean and capturing the image of sunlight reflecting on the sea as well
as the sheer freedom and exuberance of getting away from it all.
The muted, hauntingly slow “Winter,” highlighted by Loomis’ wrenching
arco bass, depicts the isolation and detachment embodied by the coldest months
of the year, while the dreamy “Station Taiga,” featuring ethereal
wordless vocals by Portugese singer Sara Serpa, gives that mood a geographical
location – the train station that marks the entryway to the “infinite
forest,” the seemingly endless, snow-covered forest that covers much of
Siberia, Canada and Alaska.
“Who Is It?” picks up the pace again, with frenetic, buoyant rhythms
inspired by the folk music of Moldova and the Balkans that Neseolvskyi heard as
a child. “Prelude for Vibes” adapts the title track of Next
Generation, written with Gary Burton in mind, into a piano trio version, while
interludes featuring a Loomis solo and an atmospheric group improvisation both
culminate in the album’s moody closer, “Almost December,” the
delicate, first-snowfall stillness of which is hypnotically enhanced by another
appearance by Serpa.
The youngest student to be accepted into the Odessa Conservatory (at age 15),
Neslovskyi moved to Germany and finally to the US, where he completed his
studies at Berklee College of Music and the Thelonious Monk Institute, where he
was awarded a full scholarship as the pianist of an ensemble handpicked by
Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Terence Blanchard. During this time, he
toured internationally with Hancock, Chaka Khan, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Terri
Lyne Carrington and shared the stage with artists such as John Scofield,
Terence Blanchard, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Benny Golson, Nicholas Payton and Steve
Coleman.
Neselovskyi’s 2013 solo piano album Music for September was produced by Fred
Hersch and received wide critical praise including a 4-star review in DownBeat.
He has worked closely with another mentor, Gary Burton, for the past twelve
years, both performing with and composing for the master vibraphonist. His next
release will be a duo recording with French horn player Arkady Shilkloper
celebrating five years of collaboration, and he has plans for an album of his
orchestral compositions in the near future.
Track Listing:
1. On a bicycle 5:02
2. Winter 7:15
3. San Felio 7:32
4. Station Taiga 6:51
5. Who is it? 5:57
6. Krai 5:58
7. Interlude I 1:09
8. Prelude for vibes 5:41
9. Get up and go 6:28
10. Interlude II 1:32
11. Almost december 6:45
Personnel:
Vadim Neselovskyi, piano, melódica
Dan Loomis, bass
Ronen Itzik, drums, percussion
Sara Serpa, vocals (4, 11)
Review:
I’m not even done listening to this album— three tracks to go as I write this—yet already I’m giving Get Up And Go the stellar rating it deserves. Neselovskyi is a rare artist even at this early, post-Berklee stage of his career: technically assured as both pianist and composer and, more important, already in possession of a distinctive vision. His music is complex, often studded with metrical hiccups that he and his trio negotiate with a dizzying aplomb. Yet it’s also accessible: On “Who Is It?” an aggressive motif, played solo on piano at the top, gives listeners something to hang onto as it powers through the shifting time. The same thing happens with the opening cut, “On A Bicycle,” whose foundation and momentum derive from a 16th-note ostinato that runs through most of the tune, breathing dimension into the momentum it creates. Another thing about “On A Bicycle,” “San Felio” and several other tracks: Though sophisticated if not complicated in their structure, the impression they make is fundamentally emotional, even joyful. In contrast, as the title suggests, “Winter” is deep and still. The opening piano figure offers a promise of optimism, like the tinkle of a music box. But then Dan Loomis’ arco bass pulls us back to a wider perspective—open, cold, even a little bleak yet also beautiful. On the album’s final song, Sara Serpa’s wordless vocal animates a kind of hushed wonder. These last moments confirm what the earliest ones suggested: Get Up And Go is a marvel.
Bob Doerschuk (DownBeat)
