Search - Sacha Perry :: Eretik

Old & new

N. Dorward | Toronto, ON Canada | 05/25/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Sacha Perry is a young pianist who's made a few appearances on record--notably with Across 7 Street, a band whose debut disc recently appeared on the Smalls label--but this is Perry's first disc as a leader. It's an intriguing mix of originality & overt stylistic borrowing. His playing is very much in a Bud Powell idiom--dark, hypnotic chording on the heads, incredibly detailed, fast linespinning for the solos. Not that it's all Bud--I can also hear Elmo Hope, Thelonious Monk, Rodney Kendrick (Kendrick & Perry are friends), Barry Harris, maybe even Frank Hewitt (another Smalls artist) in there--but it's all roughly in that Bud area. Perry rarely has a fingerslip in the way that Powell often did, but he's not slick in the usual postbop manner: the results sound authentically beboppish without being a stylistic xerox. Perry doesn't have the capacity to surprise or electrify in the way of Powell at his best, but there's a compensating grace & shapeliness to his solos.



Perry's originality is most evident in the tunes, all originals, which have a completely unique take on harmony & chord progressions--I was frequently put in mind of Herbie Nichols ("Let's Get With It" is pretty close in flavour to a quirky Nichols minor-key tune like "Cromagnon Nights"), though the Bud influence comes out again on "Desolation", with its echoes of "I'll Keep Loving You". The main thing is that these are _tunes_, not just sets of chord changes--many of them downright catchy (after a few spins of this disc I can already sing half of the melodies).



Perry's accompanists are the bassist Ari Roland & drummer Phil Stewart, both of whom play admirably. Roland has already made notable appearances on several other Smalls CDs; this CD, though, is a good place to catch him because the sound engineer this time round seems to have caught his bowed-bass solos particularly well (on earlier discs the results were often scratchy in a Paul Chambersish way; on this disc the tone is far smoother). Not an earthshaking album, to be sure, but it's one that you'll return to a lot. One of my favourites of the year so far."