Kenny Werner Trio - Animal Crackers

Styles: Piano Jazz
Year: 2017
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 54:09
Size: 124,7 MB
Art: Front

(5:27)  1. Ari
(5:07)  2. The Song Is You
(3:59)  3. Animal Crackers
(6:41)  4. Breathing Torso
(4:04)  5. I Should Care
(5:00)  6. What?
(6:42)  7. If I Should Lose You
(9:58)  8. Lago
(7:08)  9. Mechanical Arm

Four loud snare hits and you're right in the middle of this album! The first song ("Ari") starts programmatically: More modern jazz does not work! Are John Lewis and George Russell resurrected? We know everything! But no, if we listen more closely, we notice immediately: Kenny Werner has a very personal signature. There is no soulless copyist at work here. This music lives.Jazz legend Quincy Jones told the Brooklyn pianist: "100 percent soul and precision in a single person!" The next title sounds like tailor-made. "The song is you" - somewhere between Dave Brubeck and Thelonious Monk - is driven by drums. Flogging blows jostle the pearling repeatedly stumbling piano torrents until the lemming crash into the harmonic orc! Drummer Ari Hoenig convinces with his own signature and stoically precise timing but also angry Rolls and hectic pelvic work. The bassist Johannes Weidenmüller from Cologne, with his accentuated style of playing, adds exactly that little bit of cohesion to the arrangement, making the arrangements look like one piece - in spite of all the freedom that all the musicians of this trio take. Sure, the 66-year-old New York pianist and composer Werner, who completed his first TV appearance at the age of eleven, is washed with all the musical waters. He played with jazz-heroes like Archie Shepp, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Charles Mingus, Elvin Jones, Lee Konitz, Lou Rawls, Mel Lewis, Toots Thielemans, John Scofield and so on ... ..has no proof of his extraordinary abilities in Showbizz omitted.

He even succeeds in futuristic sound paintings like "Breathing Torso". Despite Synthigewaber in the intro a typical Werner play almost filmmusikmäßig and soundtrack suspicious. Hats off: There mixes radio play sounds with Gregorian-sounding choral set pieces and swelling orchestral passages including synthetic violins, but suddenly dissolve into nothingness. A true, yet 100 percent successful, challenge is "What". Choppy accented modern jazz with struggling resolution-seeking chords that suddenly switch to sparkling impersonal e-piano tones, then step into a kind of competition to make a grandfathership with him. An interesting, highly exciting finger exercise almost like the intro of a fifties newscast. Is this a radio play now? No matter, this song is captivating, exciting, somehow avant-garde but also retro yet always up-to-date music. The final piece is also fascinating: "Mechanical Arm" is a stubborn, restrained composition (sometimes exploring the limits of free jazz) but still grounded and extremely (dis-) harmonious. Had also in the disco of spaceship "Orion" can run (I see Dietmar Schönherr and Eva Pflug almost dancing in front of my eyes). A real Burner! Translate by Google ~ Willy Theobald https://www.aboutjazz.de/2017/12/kenny-werner-trio-animal-crackers.html

Personnel: Piano, Electric Piano, Synthesizer – Kenny Werner;  Bass – Johannes Weidenmueller;  Drums – Ari Hoenig

Animal Crackers

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