Ran Blake

Insiders are always hearing Art Tatum’s legacy in the sound of Oscar Peterson, or Bill Evans’s in Keith Jarrett – but the journey of Ran Blake, the now 80-year-old pianist, composer, educator and theorist, is harder to track. Blake grew up devoted to jazz, gospel music, Bartók, Debussy and film noir, became a key figure in the jazz/classical Third Stream movement, and has been making his own perceptively independent music ever since. Film noir and the French new-wave director Claude Chabrol fuel this album of flinty, eerie or austerely romantic short pieces, with Ricky Ford on occasional sax, and one operatically ghostly vocal. The wistful Cemetery is a typical Blake blend of delicate treble sketches and and hard-clanged chords, Bells of Doom and The Nights of Tremolat are among several spooky tracks referencing Chabrol composer Pierre Janssen. Ford mixes purrs and atonal smears on a wild account of Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge, is smoky and then squalling over Blake’s blithe departures on Max Roach’s Garvey’s Ghost. It’s unmistakeably jazz, but of a robustly non-generic character.
- John Fordham, The Guardian.com

PERSONNEL:

RAN BLAKE, piano
RICKY FORD, tenor sax on 4,9,11,12,14,16
DOMINIQUE EADE, vocals on 5

Begium, July13, 14 & 15, 2012

TRACKS:

01. Cemetery
02. Midnight Snow
03. The Secret Of Madame Louise
04. Vier Ernste Gesange (Fatality)
05. Bells Of Doom
06. Wedding Singer
07. Helene's Walk Home
08. Cause For Alarm (Fieldtrip)
09. Garvey's Ghost
10. The Nights Of Tremolat
11. Love Lament
12. Emergency Code
13. Balloon Ecstasy
14. Les grognards
15. I'm Going To See My Son
16. Nada
17. Watch What Happens