Shadow Plays (ECM)
Craig Taborn
Released October 2021
JazzTimes Top 30 Jazz Albums of 2021
AllMusic Favorite Jazz Albums 2021
Arts Fuse 2021 Jazz Critics Poll Top 20 New Album
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mNGOOLT21U99U0IUQajub688qzPFEdHkg
Spotify:
About:
Ten years have passed since Craig Taborn’s Avenging Angel album was released, bringing strikingly fresh ideas to the solo piano idiom. “It reflects Mr Taborn’s galactically-broad interests,” said the New York Times, “along with his multifaceted technique,” while the Guardian saluted Craig’s “world of whispered, wide-spaced figures, ringing overtones, evaporating echoes and glowering contrapuntal cascades”.
In the interim Taborn has appeared in ECM contexts large and small. We’ve heard him in his trio with Thomas Morgan and Gerald Cleaver on Chants and in his Daylight Ghosts quartet with Chris Speed, Chris Lightcap and Dave King. He’s played piano duets with Vijay Iyer on The Transitory Poems, performed Ches Smith’s music on The Bell, contributed to Roscoe Mitchell’s AACM tribute Bells for the South Side, and to Chris Potter’s music for ensemble and strings on Imaginary Cities. Alongside all of these activities, the solo music has continued to gather strength.
Over the last decade Taborn has refined and developed his approach, attaining new high ground with Shadow Plays. For Craig the recording is “part of the same continuum as Avenging Angel. Where that was a studio recording, this one is live, but that process of spontaneous composition goes onward.” The new album is a stunning live recital from the Mozart-Saal of the Wiener Konzerthaus, where the programme was headlined Avenging Angel II. In this fully improvised concert, Craig explores sounds and silences, swirling colours, densities and forms, creating new music with both poetic imagination and an iron grip on his material. His control of his craft as he unerringly creates narratives and structures from the hint of a revealed pattern, following where intuition and experience lead him, is extraordinary.
“When you improvise,” Taborn told writer Adam Shatz, in a New York Times interview, “you’re observing and creating at the same time. To make the next move, you have to get really close to what’s going on.”
“Free improvisation” can mean many things. For Taborn, in this context, this is not a matter of automatic writing or stream-of-consciousness self-expression but of keeping in focus both the larger frame of the concert and the concise statements shaped from the moment-to-moment detail of the music. “A lot of my interests revolve around trying to extend the boundaries you can create in…” Craig Taborn has noted. “Rather than simply free-flowing as I travel from Point A to Point B, I am really trying to construct and to organize the material as it emerges, in real time. And what is created in this way feels different to music using pre-composed elements.”
Taborn is a great improviser in any context, and highly regarded for his capacity to get to the heart of the music, whatever the setting. In the solo work connections to ‘jazz’ are not always self-evident, but in the flux of the piece retrospectively called “Conspiracy of Things”, allusions to the history of the music from stride piano onwards seems to flash past at lightning speed. In all pieces, ideas are explored, at multiple levels. Emotions too – tenderness and fierceness co-exist in pieces thoughtfully titled “Discordia Concors” and “Concordia Discors,” concepts that reflect the notion of unity through diversity. “I name the pieces,” Taborn said in a recent interview with Bomb magazine, “after they are finished and in consideration of their programmatic position – in a way the titling is the final stage of composition. And I intend the titles as invitations to extend the musical experience into other areas.” The inclusiveness of his work – subtly informed by music and art of many traditions – invites new associations and open responses.
Track Listing:
1. Bird Templars (Craig Taborn) 17:02
2. Discordia Concors (Craig Taborn) 08:57
3. Conspiracy of Things (Craig Taborn) 05:50
4. Concordia Discors (Craig Taborn) 11:59
5. A Code With Spells (Craig Taborn) 08:09
6. Shadow Play (Craig Taborn) 18:37
7. Now in Hope (Craig Taborn) 05:47
Personnel:
Craig Taborn: piano
Recorded live March 2, 2020, at the Wiener Konzerthaus, Wien, Austria
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover Photo: Thomas Wunsch
Design: Sasha Kleis
Review:
In 2011, two decades into a career defined by a wide array of settings and styles, mostly as a sideman and sometimes working on electric keyboards, pianist Craig Taborn released Avenging Angel, a stunning solo piano debut for ECM. The recording firmly established Taborn as a first-tier innovator and redefined the possibilities of solo piano. His music swelled and receded in unpredictable ways; it alternated moments of intense, rhythmically forceful clusters with elegant passages of great subtlety. Often it was as if you were at the shore, at times squinting into the distance to focus on the beauty at sea and at others completely inundated by it.
During the next decade Taborn refined his style both in small groups as a leader and in piano duets with fellow trailblazers Kris Davis and Vijay Iyer. On Shadow Plays, he returns to the solo format with a live concert recorded at the Wiener Konzerthaus in Vienna, where the concert was billed as “Avenging Angel II.”
Shadow Plays begins as subtly as Avenging Angel. You’d be advised to turn up the volume or you might miss the nuanced highlights at the beginning of “Bird Templars,” the 17-minute track that opens the recording, as the music begins sparsely, building toward gale force, then retreating with elegance. That pattern is repeated on one other lengthy track, “Shadow Play.” Meanwhile, Taborn’s lighter side shines on the whimsically titled pair, “Discordia Concors” and “Concordia Discors.” The program closes with the graceful sophistication of “Now in Hope,” which is followed by a thunderous ovation, suggesting that the demand for Taborn’s solo work may be too strong to let it go another decade before he revisits the setting.
Martin Johnson (JazzTimes)
