Search - Buell Neidlinger;Marty Krystall;Richard Greene;Hugh Schick;Jimbo Ross :: Blue Chopsticks: A Portrait of Herbie Nichols

Magnificent!

madamemusico | Cincinnati, Ohio USA | 09/27/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Listening to Herbie Nichols' original piano-trio recordings, one is aware of a first class musical mind working in an original and unique way; but one is also aware that these are mere sketches, that Nichols was writing for some sort of band concept in his mind. Bassist Buell Neidlinger, who knew and worked with Herbie, promised him on his deathbed that someday he would record an album of his music using that sort of line-up. The result is this album, played by a wonderful pianoless quintet that includes two strings (violin and Neidlinger's bass) in addition to trumpet and alto sax. The rhythms and textures they achieve here are truly wonderful, especially in "Blue Chopsticks" and "Portrait of Eucha" with its loping, rambling gait.



Nichols' music sounds deceptively easy but is not. His melodies alternate between charmingly melodic and quirkily irregular, the harmonies shift with the melodic shapes, and the development sections break the phrases up into little sections rather than complete 16- or 32-bar phrases. In a sense, then, Nichols' music is related to the improvisations of the great Lester Young, which also worked in a similar manner, and with which he would have been familiar from his journeyman years playing piano during the 1940s. But Nichols was also influenced by the rhythms of his father's native Trinidad as well as the spiky harmonies and angular melodic construction of the great Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, who he greatly admired since Bartok, like him, composed music based on authentic folk melodies and harmonies. But of course Bartok's music is more complex since he wrote in extended forms; Nichols' is both less formal and more whimsical. He was, after all, a jazz composer, albeit a highly original one!



In short, then, an album not to be missed if you are a fan of challenging music that is also exciting and (occasionally) funny!



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