Aaron Goldberg, The Now, album review

Jazz musician Aaron Goldberg Photo: aarongoldberg.c

By Ivan Hewett, Jazz Critic
11:20AM GMT 03 Feb 2015
Aaron Goldberg is one of that younger generation of super-aware and self-conscious American jazz pianists. They’re terribly serious, and tend to harp on about things we know already, such as the fact that jazz "lives in the moment". They know the tradition inside out, but can’t help coming at it from a distance because they know so many other things too.

The PR blurb tells us Goldberg graduated from Harvard, "with a focus on Mind, Brain and Behaviour". There are signs Goldberg knows the tougher end of classical music as well, such as the strict canon he inserts in Parker’s Perhaps. When he takes a familiar chord-change pattern, like the one from Joe Henderson’s Serenity, he cuts one bar from it just to keep us on our toes, and makes a whole new number out of it.


So for all Goldberg’s stated emphasis on ‘risk’ this is a very polished album, divided between his own compositions, a few jazz standards, and some delightful reworkings of Brazilian songs. The best of these is Chico Buarque’s gently sad Trocando Em Miudos Buarque, which Goldberg makes into something interestingly dark. Like everything on the disc it shows a fleet quality which goes beyond a delicate touch, though Goldberg has that too. It's a speed of both finger and brain, which in Warne Marsh’s Background Music in particular is astounding.

read more: http://news360.com/digestarticle/zHsPT5Xoe0Wl4ApRn1WYwQ