Listening to Bernstein Through Inventive Ears
By BEN RATLIFF
March 22, 2004
"Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein"
The Bill Charlap Trio
Produced by
Joel Moss
"Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein," by the Bill Charlap Trio
(Blue Note), contains so much inventive writing that you need several listenings
to get near it. We can take for granted that Bernstein was a gifted composer;
I'm talking about Mr. Charlap's writing, though he has no composer credits on
the album. He's not a writer of what's called original music, but that's a technicality:
he is the arranger of his own remarkable trio with the bassist Peter Washington
and the drummer Kenny Washington, for which he deserves at least as much respect.
On the uptempo songs the themes here are brilliantly organized: Mr. Charlap's
revisions are level, witty, symmetrical. At this point - this is his 10th record,
but his repertory seems vast - after having studied and covered so many theater
songs in a jazz context, Mr. Charlap has found a respectful, undidactic halfway
point between an act of restoration and advocacy, and the mounting of his own
art.
He never releases your attention and likes to jam a deft, hard skid up the keyboard
or engineer a sudden dynamic shift, with the foursquare rhythm always organized
around succinct melodic shapes. But aside from that sparkling, front-of-the-brain
bravado, what you remember from "Somewhere" is melancholy.
The record makes its first dive into darkness on the fourth track, "Lonely
Town," a slow, hymnlike ballad for trio. Here the layout is simple: there's
the theme, then Peter Washington's bass soliloquy with minimal piano and drum
accompaniment, then a piano solo. The record rallies with its shortest, fastest
song, "Jump," beginning on three cannon-blow hits of the snare drum
and ending with 23 repeats of the melody's final phrase and a final period.
Then the darkness again: two slow pieces, "Some Other Time" and "Glitter
and Be Gay," which are arranged for trio but have long solo-piano sections.
(So much so that the organization becomes a little radical: two worked-out concepts
share the same selection, as if it were two tracks in one.) We're now at the
middle of the album, its peak; "Glitter and Be Gay" is its least-known
track (from the first production of "Candide") as well as its longest,
and Mr. Charlap uses reticence, changing dynamics and tempos, to pull great
pathos from it, implying even more by restraint.
The record jolts once more with the Latin-rhythm arrangement of "America"
but then finishes slowly - the chords and the surge-and-decay accents imply
rich color - in "Ohio" and "Somewhere." The disc takes a
full hour, but progresses like a film; rarely is a new jazz record so well paced.
Internalize it, and you realize how frayed the process of making most records
has become.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
"24 Bit Digital Recording" by Dan
Daley
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