For those unaware, no instrument in Jazz has been more fertile, adaptable and misleadingly evasive than the piano. The most workaday of all instruments – the lectern or drawing board where musicians teach, singers learn, songs get composed, recomposed, arranged and rearranged – it has also been the place of the most sublime flights into personal ecstasy, as with Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett.

The piano also displays the most virtuosic technique as with Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson, or the place of the most profound pure thoughts in Jazz, as with Bud Powell, Lenny Tristano and John Lewis.

The range of piano possibilities, as broad as its keyboard itself, has meant that the line between working men and wizard is more broadly defined than on the other instruments. To become a star on the alto sax, you usually have to sound like yourself to start and Lester Young and Stan Getz did sound like themselves from the beginning. On the piano, the searchers, the accompanists, and arrangers, are often the ones who in the end rise most compellingly to the heights.

Andy Ezrin slots perfectly into this story. He is one of the many-sided and multi-faceted Jazz piano men, for whom finger-work and artwork, the roles of intricate jazz poet and nightly piano player, coincide. The hardest working man in Jazz, his enthusiasms and capacities are as truly boundless as his skills are ridiculous.

Andy continues to compose and record from his own experiences and encourage them in other musicians, only to emerge at the end with a recording that announces a music entirely his own. Elements of cool Jazz, free Jazz, acoustic fusion, and a note of wry lyricism all his own, so much that several tracks on his brand new album I Was Here seem one word-draft away from finished songs…this is classic Jazz in a new form.

1. Grapes
2. This Is What It Is
3. Greenwoman
4. Luna
5. Siren Song
6. Snowfall
7. Ain’t That Some Shit
8. If I Don’t See You
9. Wiggle Room
10. Never Enough
11. I’m Runnin’ Out of Time
12. Lost Days
13. Cascades

This wholly captivating new recording opens on the jauntily sumptuous Grapes and the dutifully dedicated This Is What It Is and then we get the slow-grooved Greenwoman, the low key piano work Luna, and both the languishing Siren Song and the free flowing beauty within Snowfall.

Along next is the forthright Ain’t That Some Shit and the quiet piano ballad If I Don’t See You and they are in turn backed by the upbeat and joyous Wiggle Room, the sedate gossamer of Never Enough, the finger-snapper I’m Runnin’ Out of Time, the album rounding out on the late night dinner music of Lost Days, closing on the ambient Cascades.

Musicians:
Andy Ezrin, piano/composer/arranger; John Patitucci, bass; Marcus Gilmore & Art Hoenig, drums; Donny McCaslin, tenor saxophone; and Randy Brecker, trumpet.

Official Website