bop n’ jazz

Art Hirahara – Libations & Meditations

BY PETER BACON

 

 

 

 

 

(Post-Tone PR8131)

thejazzbreakfast.com

If all the new tricksy piano trios – you know the ones, they shift time signature every other bar, they imitate loops and stuck CDs, they wear skinny jeans – are proving a little exhausting and you long for a more “in the classic tradition” approach, then do try this San Franciscan relocated to Brooklyn.

Hirahara has sometime Dave Douglas sidewoman Linda Oh on bass and John Davis on drums for this 11-track exploration of where he’s currently at. At times it is “in the classic tradition” – the opener With Two Ice Cubes or the solo The Looking Glass, for example; at others the band gets more abstract and free – the opening of Bop Bim Be – while when Hirahara chooses a tune he hasn’t composed it’s either the unmistakeable cool groove of Bill Evans’ Only Child or the gentle, folky anthem of Kosaku Yamada’s Karatachi No Hana.

It’s a wide-ranging yet cohesive programme from this solid student of the jazz tradition and practitioner of the jazz present.

steptempest.com

Pianist and composer Art Hirahara has worked and continues to work with a varied group of artists, from the late baritone saxophonist/activist Fred Ho to vocalist Bianca Wu to Travis Sullivan’s Björkestra, bringing a fine sense of melody and rhythmic sophistication to each project. “Libations and Meditations” is his 2nd release as a leader for Posi-Tone Records and features his current working trio of bassist Linda Oh and drummer John Davis. In the 4 years since his previous release, the pianist has been extremely busy as a sideman yet his own music feels as if it has been matured like a good wine.  One should enjoy listening to the interactions of the trio, especially how Davis locks into the groove and drives the uptempo tracks (most effectively on tracks such as “D.A.Y.“, “Be Bim Bop” and its partner “Bop Bim Be.”) Besides leading her own group, Ms. Oh has become quite an in-demand “side person”, working with Dave Douglas, Pascal LeBoueuf, and Kenny Barron.  Her playing here frames most of the pieces on the disc, from the insistent pulse that lies underneath “Father’s Song” to the “get-up-and-go” walking lines on “D.A.Y.” to the impressionistic bowed bass beneath the rippling piano lines and cymbal washes of “Dead Man Posed.”

Upon repeated listenings, one can hear just how distinctive a pianist and composer Art Hirahara has become.  Many of his pieces have strong melodies, rich chords patterns (there are moments when “Big Country” sounds like a Lennon-McCartney compositions) and his playing favors a 2-handed approach. There are 2 handsome solo piano tracks; “The Looking Glass“, which has the elegance of a George Gershwin song, and “Karatachi No Hana“, a work from Japanese composer Kosaku Yamada (1886-1965) that is lovely, with a flowing melody line and sounds quite Western.  He can also swing quite delightfully – just listen to how the Trio navigates the variable rhythms of “Be Bim Bop” and you hear musicians who certainly have great “chops” but who are also having great fun.

“Libations and Meditations” is music that deserves to be heard, not only on “record” but in person. The program has everything a piano trio – actually any sized ensemble – should have, in the intelligent melodies, great interactions and strong solos.   This is music that is full of life and deserves to be part of yours. 

www.nytimes.com

ART HIRAHARA

“Libations & Meditations” (Posi-Tone)

We live in an age of riches, at least where the subject concerns working jazz pianists. You could stick with established names, many of them playing as well as ever, and feel abundantly fulfilled. Or you could focus on new arrivals, still in their 20s, and savor a sense of discovery. What you’d miss either way is the possibility of an astute, well-traveled pianist making a breakout statement — like the one by Art Hirahara on “Libations & Meditations,” his thoughtfully assured new album.

Mr. Hirahara, just shy of 44, has been a workhorse on the New York jazz scene for more than a decade, since moving from the San Francisco Bay Area. A graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the California Institute of the Arts, he brings a broad base of knowledge to his enterprise: electronic composition, West African music, Balinese gamelan, multiple strains of the avant-garde. But his dialogue with the jazz tradition on this album isn’t inherently radical or envelope-pushing; it often sounds respectfully at ease, without being hemmed in by convention.

And his sturdy trio, with Linda Oh on bass and John Davis on drums, works just as convincingly with hard-swinging momentum (in parts of “Bop Bim Be” and its partner track, “Be Bim Bop”) as it does with minor-key crescendo building (“Big Country”) and dirgelike semi-abstraction (“Dead Man Posed”).

There’s a back story to the original material, involving the death of Mr. Hirahara’s father in 2011, but it was surely more useful to the creation of the compositions than to any understanding of them. (Mr. Hirahara’s trio will perform this music on Feb. 16 at Smalls.)

Whatever the case, Mr. Hirahara’s instincts as a composer are sensible and clear, and he isn’t too serious to acknowledge some standard influences: “With Two Ice Cubes,” the opener, is a syncopated slalom through the form of Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” and “Only Child” is a Bill Evans piece played with a fondness approaching deference.

The only other nonoriginal is “Karatachi No Hana,” a Japanese standard (by the composer-conductor Kosaku Yamada) that Mr. Hirahara imbues with an air of churchlike solemnity, as in a hymn. Playing unaccompanied, with a patient cadence and an impeccable touch, he creates a moment at once personal and unabashedly artful. NATE CHINEN

http://blogcritics.org/music-review-art-hirahara-libations-and-meditations-posi-tone/

by Jon Sobel

Jazz pianist Art Hirahara’s new trio album Libations and Meditations (Posi-Tone) has cracked a shell for me. I listen to a lot of jazz. I have even played some jazz (or at least tinkered around its edges) in my time. But I almost never write about it. Jazz writers typically show off a very deep, specialized knowledge, and like some (though by no means all) jazz musicians, they often convey an esoteric clubbiness that’s less than inviting to others who are interested but not expert.

Accompanied on Libations and Meditations by bassist Linda Oh and drummer Jon Davis, Hirahara puts forth 11 of his own compositions with a blend of fireworks and atmospherics that sounds cutting-edge and comfortable at the same time. Reminding me here of Bill Evans, there of Dave Brubeck, and over there, in the distance, faintly of Chick Corea, these numbers possess a large measure of the warmth of some of the 20th century’s most popular jazz, but they also challenge my ears and brain.

“Father’s Song” feels like a comforting parental blanket, while a three-and-a-half minute length tames the humorous but disconcertingly herky-jerky rhythms of the appropriately titled “Be Bim Bop.” (The even shorter “Bop Bim Be,” energized like a laugh by Davis’s expert drumming and decorated with mini-quotes from classic jazz themes, forms an opposite bookend near the end of the album.) The gentle solo piece “Karatachi No Hana,” presumably inspired by a traditional Japanese song by that name, sounds to me like down-home Americana, something you’d hear Rich Dworsky play on A Prairie Home Companion. “The Looking Glass,” another solo piece, has the resonance of a jazz standard, the kind that used to derive from musical theater.

“Only Child” swings easily through the kind of natural-sounding chord changes for which Hirahara has a gift, sequences that never quite resolve when you expect them to yet always do loop back home. The contrast with the next track, the eerie “Dead Man Posed” with its Chopinesque intervals and stark dissonances amid cushiony darkness, is extreme, with Davis making the most of his malleted toms and cymbal washes. And the album’s closing track, the contemplative but motile “Nereids and Naiads,” features a melodic, heartfelt solo from Oh in 5/4 time. When a piece in an odd time signature sounds thoroughly organic you know you’re in the company of a group that’s truly playing as one.

Throughout the album the trio conveys the sense of joy that marks jazz at its best. To this non-jazz writer, Hirahara’s trio has hit it out of the park with this set.