www.jazzwax.com

Pianist Orrin Evans digs-in on Flip the Script (Posi-Tone). For those unfamiliar with Evans, he has a commanding, McCoy Tyner-ish percussive attack that badgers you into an emotional corner. But Evans can be highly introspective, too. It’s truly impossible not to be moved by his piano’s snorting, charging and cajoling. Evans is joined here by bassist Ben Wolfe and drummer Donald Edwards. Sample Clean House and TC’s Blues. And dig what he does with Luther Vandross’ A Brand New Day and Gamble and Huff’s TSOP. Huge heat, sizzling technique and solid choices from the Great American Soulbook.

irockjazz.com

It can be quite risky admitting to a well-known musician that you’ve never heard of them. One, that revelation could be result in a tongue lashing by the artist. Two, the interview could come to an abrupt end, and three, my music journalistic credentials could be damaged all in the name of honesty. Thankfully, none of these has happened…yet. Though the response I did receive (after offering a follow up statement something to the extent of “the essence of music is often in the discovery of new music and artists”), was a gracious, “thank you”. As much as I was surprised by the response, I felt a forgiving ease, almost a welcoming or better yet an invitation to experience something new.

For Trenton, New Jersey born, Philadelphia bred pianist and composer, Orrin Evans, who offered the gratitude, the opportunity for more African American’s to discover, experience, and embrace their heritage in the music called “jazz” has become sort of a mission for Evans. Earlier this year, a publication questioned if Evans was going too far in his campaign to bring jazz back to black audiences. While not privy to all of his methods, he never came off as the overzealous proselytizer, as some would suggest bearing his connection to Nicholas Payton and the BAM movement, but more like a passionate preacher of the gospel hopeful his musical message can connect audiences to a time when it was cool to be a fan of jazz.

Fortunate to grow up in the musically rich soil of Philadelphia, Evans was exposed to and inspired by a expansive cross section of revered, old school, Philly musicians such as Trudy Pitts, Bobby Durham, and Charles Pettaway as well as modern peers like Bilal, The Roots, Jill Scott, and Jaguar Wright. Evans did not have to look far for a great heritage of music to uphold and opportunities to be work with a group of musicians responsible for ushering in the neo-soul movement. Under the tutelage of venerable pianist, Kenny Barron at Rutgers University, who Evan’s mentions is the main reason he went to Rutgers, Evan’s began to hew out his unique style born out of the Philly soul of his upbringing and the bop absorbed during his time navigating the New York jazz scene. Eventually he connected with mentor, Bobby Watson’s Horizon band further developing his chops on tour in Europe. Since 1994, he has recorded and performed prolifically, dropping over nearly 20 projects, appearing on tons of recordings as sideman for everyone from Pharaoh Saunders to Common, Sean Jones to Mos Def. Leader of an independent label, Imani Records, Evans splits time co-leading the critically acclaimed, Grammy nominated outfit, Tarbaby, with drummer, Nasheet Waits, and bassist, Eric Revis, leading his stellar, Captain Black Big Band and groove jazz group, Luvpark.

On the verge of releasing his new project, Flip The Script, his nineteenth recording as a leader since 1994, the 2010 Pew Arts Fellow seems unfazed by the lack of familiar faces enjoying the fruit of his labor. Judging by his extensive discography, the best way to fulfill his mission is to keep making music and performing for all those that will hear. However, Evans’, unlike many artist whose only concern is ticket sales, drive to succeed in his quest attract more black audiences stems from of a sense of responsibility instilled in him. “There is a responsibility to carry on the tradition of those who came before and a responsibility to the Evan’s family,” Evans said. I gather that for Evans, the BAM movement could not have come at a better time to validate his audience building efforts and reinforcing the responsibility to uphold the heritage of the music. “There is also a deeper responsibility that I have to come forward with some Black American music.” Evans stated.  Unapologetic about his push to see more African American’s in jazz audiences, Evans joined the list of panelist, including trumpeter, Nicholas Payton, bassist, Ben Wolfe, and saxophonists, Gary Bartz and Marcus Strickland for the now famous BAM Conference at Birdland in New York. It is clear that the BAM movement has helped him bring emphasis to his work. He asserts that BAM is essential because it gives him something for which to fight–connecting African American’s to the music of their creation. “BAM is giving jazz music new life,” he proudly states. It is apparent that BAM is now has an impact on him, not solely for the renaming purposes, which is one of Payton’s goals, but to see the thread of recognition tied back to the origins of the music. He is hopeful that more younger and African American audiences will take notice.

 

Evans’ is clear to state he is not abandoning his current audience; in fact, he will be touring Australia, Japan, and Italy this summer, or does he suggest that he has a scarce African American audience. Yet, Evans’ is resolute in his efforts to expose the music to newer audiences. He teaches classes to youth on the origins and cultural importance of the music called jazz. Though he is aware that a mission without a strategy can prove fruitless, Evan’s is not totally certain of the solution, but he does have ideas. “I don’t know the real answer; the present model is not really working,” he stated bluntly before engaging me in a story that provided insight into the weight of the issue. He told a story of when his Captain Black Big Band played to a packed audience and did a free CD giveaway to the first African American’s to come and no one came. Reminiscent of Robert Glasper’s appeal to have an opportunity for people to “not” like his music, Evans is of a similar mindset in his estimation that jazz must become cool again in order to recapture African American audiences. He suggest possibly a “superstar” artist or entertainer that will say that jazz is cool and more branded efforts, similar to Russell Simmons’ Def Comedy Jam and Def Poetry Jam. One thing is for sure, Orrin Evans will not rest until he has fulfilled his goal. So, when I was faced with the opportunity to “not” like Evans’ music, there is no doubt he gained at least one more audience member.

Orrin Evans latest project, Flip The Script, is set to release June 12, 2012 on Posi-Tone Records. Click here to pre-order your copy.

By Johnathan Eaglin

www.citypaper.net

After a series of releases paying tribute to his mentors, keyboard player Orrin Evans reasserts his own bold identity on Flip the Script (Posi-Tone). His new trio features bassist Ben Wolfe and drummer Donald Edwards, both matches for Evans in sensitivity and strength. The disc features a half-dozen originals, from the strident blues of “Big Small” to the tender melancholy of “When,” alongside four covers. Evans gives his regular nod to his hometown, as well as the late Don Cornelius, on Gamble & Huff’s Soul Train theme, and gets downright celebratory on Luther Vandross’ “A Brand New Day” from The Wiz. —Shaun Brady

www.allaboutjazz.com

Pianist Orrin Evans’ last three outings for the Posi-Tone label have been vastly different from one another. He forged new, edgy frontiers as part of the collectively formulated Tarbaby on The End Of Fear (Posi-Tone, 2010), put his own unique stamp on the big band format with the bold Captain Black Big Band (Posi-Tone, 2011), and gave a nod to Philadelphia, the city that formed and nurtured him, on the mostly trio-based Freedom (Posi-Tone, 2011).

Flip The Script finds Evans working in trio mode again, but it’s not more of the same. Freedom had a mainstream appeal to it, at least on a modern jazz measuring stick, but this album goes further afield. Morphing grooves and probing proclamations come into play as Evans explores the inner workings of this particular trio and the music it chooses to make. While it may be paradoxical to call this group a tight unit that thrives on loose maneuvers, the shoe fits. All three men are expert navigators and simpatico allies who make all the sharp turns necessary, but they never sound rigid. Flexibility may seem at odds with precision, but this group knows how to reconcile those two ideals.

“The Question” opens the album with uncertain sentiments. Quirky and perplexed pianism, stormy drums, avant swing and thorny statements characterize this piece, but not the greater whole. The following “Clean House” is a more stable venture, highlighting Evans’ soloing, and the band continues to branch out from there. The title track is marked by intricate directional shifts and hits, the slow-moving “When” contains a brief drizzle of abstract piano rain drops, and bassist Ben Wolfe shares the spotlight with Evans on a snail-slow swinger dubbed “Big Small.”

Evans slows things down with two late-in-the-game covers that touch on different moods. “Someday My Prince Will Come” is a classy, floating jewel built around reflective beauty, while “The Sound Of Philadelphia,” from the famed team of Gamble and Huff, gives Evans the opportunity to go it alone, finding a more soulful vein to tap into.

While Evans always plays at an extremely high level, he’s in rare form on Flip The Script, an album of potent piano trio music that invites and rewards repeated listening.

www.criticaljazz.com

 

www.emusic.com

Calling a piano trio album Flip the Script in 2012 might seem like too much irony to bear, but Orrin Evans and his hard-swinging rhythm section (bassist Ben Wolfe, drummer Donald Edwards) invigorate one of jazz’s most commonly deployed — not to mention beaten-into-the-ground — formats. This is Evans’s fifth album for Posi-Tone in two years, including a live big-band disc and one by the adventurous trio-plus-guests (Oliver Lake, JD Allen, Nicholas Payton) Tarbaby. On Flip the Script, the program includes eight originals, a run through “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and a melancholy, disc-closing solo version of “The Sound of Philadelphia,” aka the Soul Traintheme, a fitting tribute to his hometown and the late Don Cornelius. Stylistic shifts abound — “Question” and “Big Small” have a Monkish lurch; “TC’s Blues” lopes along in a summery, toe-tapping manner; “When” is a furrowed-brow ballad — but ultimately, it all becomes a seamless whole.

articles.philly.com

There comes a moment on pianist Orrin Evans’ new CD when he takes on Gamble & Huff’s “The Sounds of Philadelphia,” quietly passing through the tune alone. The piece is powerful and tragic, a resonant meditation on the gap between jazz and R&B and perhaps the shortcomings of his adopted town.

Evans also dips into Luther Vandross’ “A Brand New Day” from the 1975 musical The Wiz, but the tune is a much more orthodox outing, with Evans flying across the keys and pulling chords out like fresh kindling. Throughout this trio session, he burnishes his own modernist chops while paying debts to fellow pianists Thelonious Monk and McCoy Tyner.

Working with bassist Ben Wolfe and drummer Donald Edwards, Evans sounds hard-driving, percussive, and always willing to confront nubby issues. A liquid take of “Someday My Prince Will Come” becomes a welcome respite.  – Karl Stark

www.nytimes.com

Questioning Everything in a Jazz Dialogue: Socratic, Dark and Stormy

Orrin Evans Trio at Jazz Standard

Orrin Evans began one tune in his second set at the Jazz Standard on Tuesday night with a solo piano reverie, ethereal with a touch of the ominous, like Duke Ellington in a sepulchral mood. His dark but delicate sonorities slowly gathered force, until his left hand locked into a two-bar vamp evocative of a walking bass line. Seizing on the cue, the rest of his trio sprung into polyrhythmic action, pulling in several directions at once.

The tune was “The Answer,” one of the half-dozen by Mr. Evans on his forceful new album, “Flip the Script” (Posi-Tone). As unpacked in this set, it had as many soft/loud gearshifts as a Pentecostal sermon, or a Pixies song. Mr. Evans coaxed his fat, ringing sound out of the piano, occasionally calling up some closely held postbop precedent: the teasing chromaticism of Herbie Hancock, the stark modal thunder of McCoy Tyner. His playing was wily and alert, volatile but grounded, shot through with rough equilibrium.

Mr. Evans, a product of the Greater Philadelphia scene, has built a no-nonsense career out of such stuff: during a bantering interlude in the set, he noted that “Flip the Script” was his 19th album. “Neither of these cats are on the record,” he then disclaimed, indicating his bassist, Vicente Archer, and drummer, Obed Calvaire. “But they’re playing like they were on the record.” (Point taken.) He also noted that he’d planned on titling the album “Question and Answer” — in addition to “The Answer,” it includes a twisty theme called “Question” — until he remembered that Pat Metheny already had an album by that name.

His first impulse was a good one, since so much about his style calls the Socratic method to mind. But “Flip the Script” works too. Mr. Evans likes dialectical argument and declarative inquiry: in his bands he often plays the part of a strong-willed instigator.

The nature of his approach was clear from the start of this set, in a version of the standard “Autumn Leaves” so radically reharmonized that it only registered in the final stretch. Leading up to that reveal, the trio maintained the energy level of a lidded pot boiling over — but Mr. Evans, even in his most Tyner-esque jags, was hinting at a shape all along. (He has recorded the song before, but not like this.) There was as much emphasis but less suspense in the trio’s clangorous, full-tilt arrangement of “A Brand New Day,” from “The Wiz.” And there was more elastic mystery in an original ballad called “When.”

Tuesday was the start of a three-night stand for Mr. Evans, with a different group nightly. On Thursday he’ll be leading his Captain Black Big Band, which takes a heavy-gauge approach to Mr. Evans’s core strategy of intelligent combustion.

lucidculture.wordpress.com

Orrin Evans’ New Trio Album Is One of the Year’s Best

Pianist Orrin Evans has been on a creative rampage lately. Recorded at a single marathon session at a Brooklyn studio this past February, his latest album Flip the Script, a trio project with Ben Wolfe on bass and Donald Edwards behind the kit, does exactly that. It’s his most straightforward album under his own name (to distinguish his small-group work from his role as conductor/pianist with his mighty jazz orchestra the Captain Black Big Band.) To steal a phrase from the JD Allen fakebook (a guy Evans has worked with, memorably), this is jukebox jazz: roughly four-minute, terse, wickedly tuneful, relentlessly intense compositions. For lack of a better word, this is deep music, full of irony and gravitas but also wit. Evans’ work has always been cerebral: to say whether or not this is his most emotionally impactful recording depends on how much Captain Black makes you sweat.

Question, by bassist Eric Revis, opens the album with a relentless unease that will pervade much of what’s to come, the rhythm section walking furiously against an evil music-box riff from the piano: the way Evans shadows Wolfe as the bassist pulls away from the center and then returns is one of the album’s many high points and will have you reaching for the repeat button. The first Evans composition here, Clean House, works gravely bluesy modalities into a dark Philly soul melody: the trio’s simple, direct rhythmic rhythmic insistence on the third verse is a clinic in hard-hitting teamwork. With its apprehensive chromatics, the title track has echoes of Frank Carlberg, Edwards coloring it with counterintuitive accents and the occasional marauding, machinegunning phrase as much as he propels it, something he does throughout the album: fans of Elvin Jones or Rudy Royston will eat this up. The quietly imploring, spaciously Shostakovian minimalism of When makes quite a contrast: Evans’ coldly surreal, starlit moonscape could be Satoko Fujii.

A phantasmagorical blues, Big Small balances slyness against gravitas, Wolfe turning in a potently minimalist solo as he builds to quietly boomy chords against the drums, Evans offering hope of a resolution but then retracts it as the mysterioso ambience returns. The piano’s relentless interpolations build to an artful clave rumble by Edwards and then a false ending on a bracingly chromatic reinvention of Luther Vandross’ A Brand New Day, while TC’s Blues, a diptych, morphs from loungey swing to expansive, allusively shadowy modalities that give Edwards a platform to whirl and rumble on. They follow that with an unexpectedly brooding take on Someday My Prince Will Come, then go back to the originals with The Answer, a clever, considerably calmer response to the Revis tune

The album ends with The Sound of Philadelphia, Evans’ hometown. But this isn’t happy tourists gathered around a bicentennial Liberty Bell: it’s a vacant industrial lot in north Philly next to a diner that’s been closed for years and a house that may or may not have people in it. Evans strips Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s jovial Philly soul tune to the bone, slows it down, takes every bit of bounce out and adds a menacing turnaround. It’s a quietly crushing way to bring this powerful creation to a close. Count this among the half-dozen best jazz albums to come over the transom so far this year, another major contribution from the Posi-Tone label.

www.downbeat.com

Orrin Evans, Flip The Script (Posi-Tone)
Orrin Evans is a pianist, composer and bandleader whose reputation has been steadily rising, particularly with his Captain Black Big Band. But on his latest recording,Flip The Script, we find Evans equally powerful in the trio setting. From the first tune, “Question,” my personal answer was “Hell, yeah!” And that’s the way I felt throughout the album. Evans and his bandmates Ben Wolfe on bass and Donald Edwards on drums shoot out of the gate at a blindingly fast tempo on this Eric Revis tune, showing off a rare combination of technique and taste. It’s the beginning of a fine ride of musical story-telling with sublime song choice and pacing. Flip The Script is packed with intricate twists, turns and changes. It’s a killer straightahead date with bright, modern edges. On the sad, lovely ballad “When,” Evans has just the right touch, filling and opening space for Wolfe and Edwards to ebb and flow. Edwards’ mallet work on the tune is especially poised and understated. Also fine are very cool takes on Luther Vandross’ “A Brand New Day” and the standard “Someday My Prince Will Come” as well as Evans originals “TC’s Blues” and “The Answer.” My favorite moment on the recording is a solo piano take of “The Sound Of Philadelphia.” Most people know this as the theme song from “Soul Train,” the seminal black music TV show. We lost Don Cornelius, the show’s creator and host, earlier this year. And Mr. Evans, a Philly kid at heart, offers a fitting tribute. It’s a quietly stunning epilogue to a thrilling record.

–Frank Alkyer, Publisher