Posi-Tone
   Join our mailing list

Ben Ratliff’s New York Times review of the Sam Yahel “Hometown” concerts at the Village Vanguard this week…..

leave a comment

A Jazz Pianist Who Has Honed His Style While Hiding in Plain Sight

by Ben Ratliff

Sam Yahel played his own song “Truth and Beauty” around the middle of his early set on Tuesday night at the Village Vanguard. In the past he’s recorded it on Hammond organ, in a different group, with saxophone and drums. Here he was playing it on the piano, with the bassist Matt Penman and the drummer Jochen Rückert, and it had a different personality: first more tense, with its crowded contrapuntal opening, then more permissive and abstract. Lots of space opened up. Mr. Yahel played straight notes over swung grooves and slow phrases over cruisingly fast bass and drums. The music felt suspended and comfortable, and kept its cool.

Mr. Yahel came to New York in 1990, starting music school as a pianist. Then he adapted to the organ, and a career quickly came into view: he had less competition. Many associate him with the organ, either in his own groups or touring with Joshua Redman and Brian Blade.

But he never gave up playing piano. About five years ago he started playing regular piano-trio gigs at Smalls, and after a few years of them he made a convincing piano-trio record, “Hometown,” which was recently released on Positone. As a result, he’s leading a band at the Vanguard for the first time.

The group is developed and ready, yet most of us are only hearing it now as it should have been heard long ago: on a good record and in the Vanguard’s sonic environment. Consequently, this band represents an undiscovered view of jazz from the recent past. It’s hard to talk about Mr. Yahel’s style, which weighs searching phrases against alert, melodic swing from the bebop tradition, without bringing up another pianist, Brad Mehldau. The two went through music school together, playing together a lot, and there are deep similarities — not only in the individual keyboard sound but in their strategies for piano trio as well.

The difference is that long ago Mr. Mehldau started playing hardball, stylizing his sound as he became relatively famous, and Mr. Yahel, even with his unusually sharp songwriting and smart arrangements, still sounds as if he’s having a casual good time. With Mr. Penman and Mr. Rückert, Mr. Yahel played versions of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” Thelonious Monk’s “Think of One,” Cole Porter’s “So in Love” and the standard “My Ideal”; he also played another stately original, “Oumou,” inspired by the Malian singer Oumou Sangaré.

It was the details that mattered, both in what he did and didn’t do. More than once Mr. Yahel used the melody of the previous song as a spur for improvising in the present one, making the set feel interconnected. He was always temperate: in “Oumou,” when the rhythm collapsed in on itself, he kept the melody standing, playing a murmured, concentrated version of it. It was a wise set, sweeping and unpretentious.

Share

Written by editor

April 22nd, 2010 at 6:58 pm

Posted in Reviews

Tagged with ,