Styles: Piano Jazz
Year: 2013
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 68:00
Size: 157,8 MB
Art: Front
(6:17) 1. I Believe In You
(6:08) 2. A Body At Rest
(6:10) 3. A Weaver Of Dreams
(7:01) 4. Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye
(9:22) 5. The Walk-Up
(8:02) 6. The Eternal Triangle
(4:57) 7. I'll Keep Lovin' You
(6:27) 8. Hittin' The Jug
(6:11) 9. The Hymnotist
(7:20) 10. George Washington
There are few jazz pianists performing today who excel in the art of the straight-ahead piano-bass-drums trio as brilliantly as does Peter Zak. The empathy that he, bassist Peter Washington, and drummer Willie Jones III achieve on all 10 tracks of The Disciple the Los Angeles-born, New York- based pianist’s tenth album in 10 years for SteepleChase Productions and eighth such trio recording for the esteemed Danish label is nothing short of breathtaking. “The fact that the piano is the lead instrument in terms of playing the melody appeals to me,” Zak says of the trio format. “There’s that, and the hookup between the ride cymbal and the bass doesn’t get any better than that. The reason I play jazz is basically for that feel.” Critics are sure to rave about The Disciple, much as they have for his earlier trio recordings.“Peter Zak has developed into a pianist who knows what to leave out when playing, giving his music a buoyancy often lacking in trio CDs,” Ken Dryden wrote in NYC Jazz Record of Zak’s previous release, 2013’s The Eternal Triangle with bassist Washington and drummer Billy Drummond. “[T]his,” Dryden added, “is an interactive trio of equals, not just a leader and sidemen.” “The three musicians are as tight as a regularly working trio, even though they don’t play together too often,” Lee Hildebrand said of the same album in Oakland’s East Bay Express. And, in his review for the Newark Star-Ledger of 2008’s Blues on the Corner: The Music of McCoy Tyner with bassist Paul Gill and drummer Quincy Davis, Zan Stewart opined, “The inventive, poised pianist and composer Peter Zak he of bebop-and-beyond heart creates beguiling passages of flowing melody driven by an assured swing.”
Zak is a stylistic disciple of some of the greatest jazz pianists of the bop and post-bop eras. He salutes six of them on The Disciple with personalized interpretations of compositions by Chick Corea, Elmo Hope, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Hampton Hawes, and Thelonious Monk, along with three of his own and one by the Russian classical composer and pianist Alexander Scriabin. He hadn’t initially planned a CD of tunes made up entirely of tunes by piano players. It just turned out that way, as did the fact the set opens and closes with waltzes: Chick Corea’s “The Loop” and his own “The Disciple.” His decisions must have been subconscious, as he has long shown himself to be master of programming music who often selects great yet little-known songs for his recordings and live performances.“I want to do things that are off the beaten track, something that hasn’t been done a lot,” he explains. “I guess that’s one way of trying to make it a little more distinctive, but I also do things that are not overlooked, like ‘Weaver of Dreams’ and ‘The Eternal Triangle’ on my last record and ‘Criss Cross’ on this one.” A friend turned Zak on to “The Loop” from Corea’s 1984 ECM album Trio Music Live in Europe. “I really like stuff that’s not overwrought,” Zak says of the song. “Chick’s music is kind of brittle and sparse at times but really harmonically hip.” Since recording his own up-tempo samba “Montserrat,” Zak has been playing a quintet arrangement on gigs with Carlos Abadie’s quintet, but it had not been recorded previously. “It has kind of a static melody over moving chord changes,” he explains. “It’s something Cedar Walton did a lot. I’m drawn to that structure.” “Barfly” is a ballad that Hope recorded on a trio album in 1959. “I really like people who are able to take that bebop vocabulary and just point it in a different direction and personalize it, “Zak says.
Silver’s “Nutsville,” on which the groove switches between mambo and swing, first appeared on his classic 1965 The Cape Verdean Blues album. “The voicing that I play is the way the quintet and the piano played it with three melodies kind of scrunched together in a cluster,” Zak explains. “Horace’s timing is just so funky and flawless. He doesn’t overdo it.” “Prelude Op. 35 #2” is the oldest song on the CD, written by Scriabin in 1903, and the only one Zak plays without accompaniment. “This is somewhat like a Tin Pan Alley song of the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, the way it’s put together,” Zak says. “He used these tri-tone connecting devices that were used 40 or 50 years later in bebop. And he used kind of jazz voicings.” The minor, gospel-imbued blues “Requiem” is an early Hancock composition that made its debut on Royal Flush, a 1961 Blue Note album by trumpeter Donald Byrd. “He’s great like nobody else can be,” Zak says of Hancock. Zak adds that Washington convinced him to play it at a slower tempo than Byrd had. Hawes wrote the bebop blues “Jackie” and recorded it in 1952 at The Haig in Los Angeles with saxophonist Wardell Gray. “He often sounds like he’s leaving something in reserve; at the same time he’s just really personal,” Zak says of Hawes. Washington takes the first solo, which begins with a quote from “C Jam Blues” played in, the pianist points out, “a different key than the tune is in.” Solos by Zak and Jones follow. Monk’s “Criss Cross” is the best known song in the set. “I like Monk tunes that kind of rest on one chord a lot,” Zak says. “Monk is best played at a medium swing. I like playing that groove, anyway.”
Zak says that his ballad “Nightfall in Kandy” is named for a beautiful region of Sri Lanka, the country from which his girlfriend hails. He adds that the title is a play on the ballad “Dusk in Sandi” by Bud Powell, another of his piano heroes.The disc closes with the title track. “It starts off with a vamp that’s kind of neither major nor minor,” Zak says of the swinging waltz. “It’s modal and open, and has some tension and release.” The Disciple is the fourth straight Zak album in a row on which the prolific Washington has played. The two had rehearsed together a few times in the mid-’80s when they lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, but they became better acquainted musically after they relocated to New York City. “He’s one of the best musicians I’ve ever played with,” Zak says of the bassist. “He really knows how to break up the time and to really find the groove when it needs to be found. He hears everything that’s happening immediately.” Zak’s association with Jones dates to 1998 when both were sidemen on trumpeter Ryan Kisor’s The Usual Suspects CD. “He’s got a lot of energy but he’s not bombastic,” Zak says of the much-in-demand drummer. “I just like his sensibility about swinging.” Peter Zak was born on May 13, 1965, in Los Angeles and grew up in Columbus and Kent, Ohio. When he was five, his mother taught him the basics of piano playing and reading music, and after six months, he began a decade-long series of private lessons, including a period with internationally renowned concert pianist Margaret Baxtresser. After the family moved to Oakland when Zak was 16, he developed an interest in jazz when his high school band director showed him how to play the chord changes to “Stella by Starlight.” Studies with Susan Muscarella, now president of the California Jazz Conservatory, followed at UC Berkeley, where he also played in the UC Jazz Ensembles and earned a B.A. in history. He was soon gigging around Northern California with saxophonist John Handy, among others.
Upon relocating to New York City in 1989, he began participating in Sunday afternoon jam sessions at the Village Gate and quickly fell in with an ever- widening group of like-minded players at Augie’s on the Upper West Side. They included Eric Alexander (who recently appeared as a member of the pianist’s quartet at Smalls), Joe Farnsworth, Joel Frahm, John Webber, and Scott Wendholt. Zak has accompanied such jazz greats as Jimmy Cobb, George Coleman, Junior Cook, Scott Hamilton, Billy Hart, Jon Hendricks, and Etta Jones at clubs and concerts and has, in addition to his own 10 CDs, recorded with Ryan Kisor, Walt Weiskopf, Tom Guarna, Vincent Gardner, Stephen Riley, and others. In 2005, Zak received a $10,000 grant from the Doris Duke Foundation and Chamber Music America to compose and perform a new work for his trio. He has also been on the faculty of the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music since 1995 and currently teaches an ensemble class there. “In jazz, the music has to grab you somehow,” Zak states. “Even if it’s really complex, it still has to be catchy. My primary goal is to create something that listeners find interesting and enjoyable.” The Disciple is a glowing manifestation of those principles, as well as an example of the art of the piano trio at its finest. https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/peterzak
Personnel: Peter Zak piano; Peter Washington bass; Billy Drummond drums.
The Eternal Triangle
