Billy Lester ....

JAZZ CONCERTS IN ITALY

with Billy Lester

July 8th 2015
     Sala d’Armi,Castello di Panzano in Chianti
      Billy Lester on piano
      Marcello Testa on bass
      Carlo Fagiani  on drums

July 15th 2015
Winery Fattoria Le Fonti, Panzano in Chianti 
     Billy Lester on piano
       Nicola Stranieri  on drums
       Marcello Testa on bass

July 28th 2015
Villa Pecille (Winery Fontodi) Panzano in Chianti 
     Billy Lester on Piano
       Gary Levy on Alto Sax

Pianist Billy Lester is a musical original. That’s obvious from the first, oh, 17 seconds of Unabridged, his sixth album and second all-solo recording.

Listen to the unusual, brief motif with which Lester opens “Overture: Passionate Musings,” then develops, complicates and completes it faster than you’d tie a shoelace. Pause -- and he continues. Not to just recapitulate or elaborate the cell-like theme through variation, but to expand it as a theme in a concentrated, melodically flowing way that’s not exactly “songlike,” or modal, either. Call it the genre of no genre.

Because what Lester does here contains sonic elements that might be identified with compositional modernism, contemporary “classical” music, or sounds that seem to exist as if only sprung from themselves – it’s not so obvious that he arrives at his singularity through decades of deep devotion to and teaching of the music we all call jazz. Swing, the blues and American songbook standards, jazz icons as well as major composers of the Western classical tradition are Lester’s touchstones, regardless of that fact that what he’s creating now ignores, sidesteps, bypasses or abstracts virtually all American music’s basic conventions.

But Lester is secure in his identity. “At times I’ve played for people and they’re very surprised to find what I do is jazz, and that it’s improvised,” says the pianist, who started at his instrument when he was four, and has kept at it for some 60 years. “My music here is entirely improvised,” he asserts. “This is simply the first time I’ve released anything free-form.”


Free-form -- “free jazz”? -- isn’t typically what we associate with such of Billy Lester’s heroes as Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Lennie Tristano and Sal Mosca, his most directly influential teacher. They all jazzed, advanced and fans believe improved strains of repertoire familiar in their day. Although Tristano, whom Lester met during his teens and hung out with, did record the first freely improvised jazz sides, “Intuition” and “Digression,” in 1949, he and his acolyte Mosca, too, insisted that their students thoroughly absorb a canon of classic performances before venturing to establish voices much less styles of their own. After half a century of effort, Billy Lester has reached the level of accomplished self-possession to do that.

from: Jazz Promo Services
Press Contact: Jim Eigo, jim@jazzpromoservices.com