Customer Reviews

Prevue of Tomorrow

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've had mixed feelings about this one, but after enough listens I think it's a winner. Madsen's got a truly amazing technique at the keys, and he's not a delicate impressionist: he hits that piano hard, & makes it sing and shout and sometimes nearly explode. The recital on _Prevue of Tomorrow_ is a true collector's-choice of tunes by great "outsider" jazz pianists: Mal Waldron, Andrew Hill, Hasaan, Muhal Richard Abrams, Herbie Nichols, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Randy Weston, Dick Twardzik and Lennie Tristano. Think of this album as an alternate-reality version of one of those Maybeck Recital Hall albums--there's the same sense of a spotlit master at work, but the aesthetic landmarks are totally different. As with Monk tunes, these are piece stamped with the composers' style of improvising, and so the question becomes how you approach them without either pointless imitativeness or blithe indifference to the original versions. And that's where this recital really scores: Madsen has a knack for acknowledging the stylistic markers of the original composers (for instance, the demonically coiled lines of Tristano or the dark, trancelike forcefulness of Waldron) while creating something strikingly different nonetheless. Sometimes I think he ranges a little too far afield--I'm not quite sure why Hill's "Subterfuge" becomes a vast Iberian rhapsody, for instance--but other pieces work beautifully, especially the dark, devastating versions of Taylor's early piece "Rick Kick Shaw" and Weston's "Blues for Africa". It's a very dense album, to the point where I felt like coming up for air after some of these tracks finished, but it's great to hear a pianist who loves the hard, _definite_ sound of piano in the Bud Powell/Thelonious Monk tradition -- the dissonances and ambiguities here hit you squarely, avoiding the feathery suspensiveness of piano in the mainstream Hancock/Bill Evans lineage. This is an album that will wow aficionados of solo piano recitals. Excellent sound, too, always a key factor in albums of this kind.

Peter Madsen is a gifted pianist who has often worked with the guitarist Michael Musillami, and this disc makes you wish that he was given more opportunities to record on his own. It's anything but the usual mixture of originals and a few standards; instead, he explores adventurous pieces by pianists who, like him, worked at the outer edges of conventional postwar jazz, interested in dissonance and free improvisation held within strong melodic and rhythmic structures. Here, for example, are tunes by Andrew Hill, Herbie Nichols, Sun Ra, Randy Weston and Richard Twardzik, all of them deconstructed and surprising. It is comparable to the best solo work of Dave Burrell (Recital) or Stanley Cowell (Live at Maybeck).