Music and Recording Reviews

Larry Goldings: I Will
Larry Goldings, piano; Karl McComas-Reichl, bass; Christian Euman, drums
Sam First SFR 007. 2025. Paul Solomon, prod.; Nick Calapine, David Robaire, Bernie Grundman, engs.
Performance ****½
Sonics ****

Like almost every organ player, Larry Goldings came to the Hammond via piano. As a professional, he has used both concurrently. His organ trio with guitarist Peter Bernstein and drummer Bill Stewart has been going for 35 years. But it wasn't until about seven years after that group's founding that Goldings made his first trio album with only a piano, Awareness, with Larry Grenadier and Paul Motian. He has rarely done it since.

In October 2023 and April 2024, Goldings and younger charges Karl McComas-Reichl (bass) and Christian Euman (drums) played at the Los Angeles venue Sam First. Upon hearing recordings, Goldings distilled portions of both sets into I Will.

The album starts and ends with Goldings originals alongside three standards (two by the Gershwins, one by Leonard Bernstein) and three unusual choices: Mario Bauzá's "Mambo Inn," "Jesus Was a Cross Maker" by singer-songwriter Judee Sill (first recorded a few years after Goldings was born), and the Lennon-McCartney title track. (Bernstein's "Somewhere" and the closing "Sing Song" are only available on the digital version.) The sound has an intimate-club feel, balanced and warm, with audience applause, like an old Bill Evans Vanguard recording.

Goldings, unsaddled from bass duties, can concentrate on melody and highlight his bouncy touch on the keys and unamplified swing. As a leader, he understands that concision is an asset, so no tune crosses that dreaded nine-minute mark. Those who know Goldings's alter ego Hans Groiner will appreciate the humor of quotes he throws in, like "Jeepers Creepers" in Bauzá's "Mambo Inn" or closing "It Ain't Necessarily So" with Chopin's funeral march.—Andrey Henkin

The Fury: Live in Brooklyn
Mark Turner, tenor saxophone; Lage Lund, guitar; Matt Brewer, bass; Tyshawn Sorey, drums
Giant Step Arts GSA 15 (CD). 2024. Jimmy Katz, prod.; Katz, James Kogan, engs.
Performance ****½
Sonics *****

Word on the street is that the hot place to hear jazz in New York is Ornithology, a funky, intimate space in Brooklyn with rugs on the floor, edgy art on the walls, and great acoustics. There is no stage. People sit right next to the band. Ornithology is all about community and music.

But what if, like this correspondent, you live 2700 miles from New York? That's what Jimmy Katz is for. He may be the best engineer in jazz at recording live music. Live in Brooklyn is the closest you can come to the Ornithology experience without a plane.

The Fury is a supergroup. Mark Turner's stature proves that jazz is a meritocracy. He is not charismatic. All he does is stand expressionless at a microphone and unleash floods of brilliant tenor saxophone ideas, which he shapes into complete designs. Lage Lund is the Mark Turner of guitarists. He does not play licks or take tunes off. He works exclusively in domains of pure aesthetic revelation. Matt Brewer is beyond a first-call bassist. Tyshawn Sorey has won so many major awards as a composer and bandleader (including a new Pulitzer) that it is easy to forget he is a world-class badass drummer.

"Vignette" is by Lund, but it sounds like both Turner and Lund are creating its theme in the moment. Then each takes a long, reaching, increasingly intricate solo. Lund does not so much comp for Turner as propose an alternate melodic reality. The floor under them keeps shifting because of the rhythmic volatility of Brewer and Sorey. "In Our Time" is a yearning song by Brewer that Turner patiently intensifies. Again, Lund supports Turner with complementary countermelodies. At first you don't notice when Lund replaces Turner as the soloist. While their voices are different, their mission is the same: to search out beauty in new forms.—Thomas Conrad

Joachim Kühn: Échappée
Joachim Kühn, piano
Intakt CD431 (CD). 2025. Joachim Kühn, prod.; Kühn, Klaus Scheuermann, engs.
Performance ****
Sonics ****

Turning 81 in March 2025, Germany's Joachim Kühn is one of the last surviving pianists from the nascent era of European avant-garde jazz, and only his late compatriot Wolfgang Dauner was nearly as far-ranging. In Kühn's oeuvre over 60 years and counting, he has really done it all, everywhere and with almost everyone, from free jazz in Paris to fusion in Los Angeles.

Kühn has worked in various formats, but one to which he keeps returning is the solo piano recital. Échappée is his 33rd such outing. Following earlier ones on ACT, JTM, and his own Bold Music Recordings, this one is his debut for Intakt, the longtime Swiss home to Kühn's only living German piano peer, Alexander von Schlippenbach.

This two-disc set comprises five sessions from spring and winter 2023, engineered by Kühn at Salinas Studio in his longtime home on the Spanish island of Ibiza. All but one of the 13 originals are new compositions, most with evocative one-word names: The title track from disc one translates as "Escape"; others are "Hunting," "Space," "Battlefield," and "Nuances." The biographical "My Long Life with Brother Rolf " fêtes his late clarinetist brother, who passed away in 2022 at 92. That song is the second longest at nearly 13 minutes, with the title track exceeding that mark.

Approaching 80 at the time of recording, Kühn had lost not an iota of his invention, flair, or technical facility. Even in the highest-speed runs, every note is perfectly articulated. If it were not on a jazz label, Échappée could easily be on Deutsche Grammophon. Yet there are just as many explorations of space and resonant beauty.

The longer pieces are more expansive and abstractly suite-like, while the shorter ones are focused on motifs. And though Ibiza doesn't really have seasons, disc two, the spring set, feels lighter and warmer.—Andrey Henkin