Stephen Riley & Peter Zak - Haunted Heart

[voyeurnice 16]

Artist: Stephen Riley & Peter Zak

Title: Haunted Heart

Year Of Release: 2015

Label: SteepleChase

Genre: Jazz

Quality: Mp3 / 320kbps

Total Time: 70:12 min

Total Size: 159 MB

Tracklist

----------

01. Isfahan

02. You Do Something To Me

03. Prisoner Of Love

04. Punjab

05. The Intimacy Of The Blues

06. Haunted Heart

07. After You've Gone

08. Moment's Notice

09. There's A Small Hotel

10. Alice In Wonderland

11. Pennies From Heaven

 

Seventy-years ago, the Great American Songbook was still paramount as the professional jazz performer's bible. Players who couldn't hang when popular tunes were called summarily found themselves shame-faced on the sidelines of a jam session or gig. Though barely pushing forty, saxophonist Stephen Riley comes out of that storied fealty to melodic mastery and the primacy of a well-minted song. Ten years Riley's senior, pianist Peter Zak is equivalently versed. The pair put tradition to practice on Haunted Heart, an intimate assemblage of eleven standards that skew towards pre-WWII provenance, but prove anything but antiquated. Zak first teamed with Riley on the saxophonist's fifth album, adding an element in his instrument that was previously outside the tenorist's usual purview. Even so, the caliber of their musical camaraderie was nearly instantaneous. The accompanying essay to their last album together intimated the existence of this date and the results are certainly worth the wait. Absent bass and drums as rhythmic agents, the duo relies on agreed upon aural semaphores to keep the interplay from flagging. Zak's keyboard approach, at once spare and porous allows his partner to range freely through the contours of each piece and devote an even greater than customary focus on textured tonal variation. Riley uses the hardest reeds possible to generate a breathy, almost bifurcated sound that sheathes his phrases in an enveloping fine-grained rasp with direct antecedents in past tenor paragons like Don Byas and Ben Webster.

Billy Strayhorn's ballad "Isfahan" serves as opener and a scintillating distillation of the carefully-constructed dynamics on display as Riley voicing the theme with sensuous, flute-like buoyancy and Zak shapes terrestrial-bound chords beneath him. Joe Henderson's "Punjab", previously tackled by Riley on an earlier session and a regular entry in his stage songbook, features the duo in an up-tempo interaction that expertly blends melodic velocity with emotive import. Once again the spontaneous communication spills over into the sublime with each player anti[beeep]ting and answering the other with accelerated alacrity. Coltrane's "Moment's Notice" is the other "relatively-recent" selection and still well over six decades old. While not quite on par with the pristine performance of the Henderson piece, it's still a gorgeous parade of sustained invention especially in a surprising mid-piece downshift to waltz-time. "Prisoner of Love", "After You've Gone" and "Pennies from Heaven" all feature unaccompanied introductory choruses by Riley. His sterling command of the form suggests that a future solo album venture should be an enterprise worthy of serious consideration. Zak's already recorded in that setting and takes comparable honors on "The Intimacy of the Blues", the title piece and "Alice in Wonderland". He makes equally excellent use of the isolation in priming the ears for Riley's empyrean entry in each case. Whatever reservations the tenorist once harbored about piano placement in his ensembles or as pinion-resistant partner for improvisation, it's safe to surmise they are firmly the province of the past.

~ Derek Taylor

Personnel: Stephen Riley (tenor saxophone), Peter Zak (piano)

 

 

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