Music and Recording Reviews

Harvey Diamond/John Lentz: how strange the road should be so easy
Diamond, piano; Lentz, vocals
Orchard of Pomegranates 006 (CD). 2025. Ayelet Rose Gottlieb, prod.; Craig Welsch, eng.
Performance ****
Sonics ****

If there was ever a sleeper album, this is it. This is John Lentz's recording debut, at 76. He has been involved with music his whole life but has never quite had a professional career until now. Harvey Diamond makes his recording debut as a leader, at 82. He was one of Lennie Tristano's last students and has been an underground figure on the Boston jazz scene for decades.

You don't hear singers like Lentz these days. Hundreds of vocalists out there have powerful pipes and undeniable chops. Few get under your skin the way Lentz does. "Detour Ahead" has always been an ambivalent love song. Lentz's dead-slow version sounds like someone in a conversation with himself, searching for understanding. His voice is gentle, contemplative, and patient. He does not make every note, and sometimes he seems to hesitate over a phrase. But his voice is so disarming, honest, and human that you trust its emotional authenticity. Even when he sings simpler, happier songs, he lingers over them, turns them inward, and reveals unsuspected nuances in their stories. Who knew that "Ain't Misbehavin'" was a poignant tale of unrequited love?

As for Diamond, who is this guy? Why isn't he famous? Four of the 11 tracks are piano solos, and each is stunning. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" reveals Diamond's gift for getting deep inside a great song and elaborating and enlarging it without ever abandoning its essence. "You Don't Know What Love Is" is another timeless classic that Diamond makes his own. He marks out the familiar theme in firm chords and then begins to add digressions, decorations, and variations all around that melodic core. By the time he is done, it feels like he has left nothing in that song unsaid.

This album has a quality that's rarer than perfection: irresistible charm.—Thomas Conrad

Frank Kimbrough: The Call
Kimbrough, piano
Sunnyside SSC 1777 (CD). 2010/2025. Maryanne de Prophetis, Matt Balitsaris, prods.; Balitsaris, eng.
Performance ****½
Sonics ****½

In the jazz world, Frank Kimbrough was esteemed as a pianist and beloved as a person. It was a hard blow when he died suddenly, in 2020, at 64. The Call is a solo album, recorded in 2010 by Kimbrough's favorite engineer, Matt Balitsaris. Apparently Balitsaris recently rediscovered the tapes.

Kimbrough held down the piano chair in the two most significant jazz orchestras of our time, Maria Schneider's and Ryan Truesdell's. His death left an unfillable void in jazz. The Call is much more than a posthumous tribute. It is one of the finest solo piano recordings of the current century.

It is surprising that Kimbrough made only one other solo album (Air, in 2007), because he sounds born to the format. Alone at the keyboard, he is energized and inspired. His playing is angular and percussive, yet lush. In 2018, he released an epic six-CD set, Monk's Dreams, containing the complete compositions of Monk. But he sounds more like Monk on The Call, which has no Monk tunes. "Angelica" is an example. It is one of Duke Ellington's catchiest melodies. Kimbrough's version is fragmented, harmonically twisted, dark.

Kimbrough's romanticism is more overt than Monk's. The solo format turns him meditative and deeply lyrical. "Tin Tin Deo," Dizzy Gillespie's classic of Afro-Cuban syncopation, becomes an improbable ballad. The actual ballads here are extraordinary. "I Loves You, Porgy" is drawn out oh so slow, in aching single notes, with long, expectant silences between them. Two other Ellington tunes, "Reflections in D" and "In a Sentimental Mood," are almost as rapt.

This writer once interviewed Kimbrough and asked him what was on his bucket list. He said, "To make a record for ECM and headline at the Village Vanguard." He never made it. It was ECM and the Vanguard that missed out.—Thomas Conrad

Ivo Perelman & Matthew Shipp String Trio: Armageddon Flower
Perelman, tenor saxophone; Shipp, piano; Mat Maneri, viola; William Parker, bass
TAO Forms TAO 18 (CD). 2025. Perelman, Shipp, TAO Forms, prods.; Jim Clouse, eng.
Performance ****
Sonics ****½

"Avant-garde jazz" seems an inappropriate name for a genre so old. It goes back at least as far as Ornette Coleman's first record, in 1958. The insurrectionaries of the avantgarde (or "free jazz," as it is often called) are still hard at it. Ivo Perelman and Matthew Shipp are astonishingly prolific. They have made 46 records together and many more with other people.

Free jazz has a small, loyal, open-minded audience. At its best, this music offers revelations obtainable no other way. The challenge has always been to get new, less courageous listeners to stick around long enough to experience those enlightenments.

Armageddon Flower may be a good place for such listeners to start. This quartet is a rare entity: an avant-garde chamber ensemble. With no drummer and three stringed instruments (counting the piano), the music contains ample open space. It is easier to hear what is going on.

Here are a few examples of revelations: The way that, three minutes into a 16-minute piece, "Pillar of Light" has already become many things: a violent piano tremolo; a series of maniacal cries wrenched from a saxophone; a sudden moody ballad; calls and responses in which a tenor saxophone doubles a viola. The suspenseful conversation between Perelman and Shipp at the beginning of "Restoration" that never quite erupts. The way that William Parker's bass occasionally, dramatically, stands clear.

Because these four players are so profoundly in the moment and so trusting of their wildest impulses, it is a continuous revelation that they keep arriving at meaningful form.

Another reason you can hear what is going on is the clean, objective recorded sound of engineer Jim Clouse.—Thomas Conrad

Dan Weiss: Unclassified Affections
Peter Evans, trumpet; Patricia Brennan, vibraphone; Miles Okazaki, guitar; Dan Weiss, drums
Pi Recordings Pi108 (LP/Digital/reviewed as CD). 2025. Weiss, David Breskin, Seth Rosner, Yulun Wang, prods.; Marc Urselli, Mike Marciano, engs.
Performance ****
Sonics *****

To outsiders, New York may seem like a monolith, but locals know it as a patchwork of neighborhoods, each with a particular vibe. The city's jazz scene is the same. One of the hippest zip codes of the past quarter-century has been at Pi Recordings.

One of Pi's unofficial mayors is drummer Dan Weiss. Weiss has served as leader of five Pi sessions. The first two were with sprawling ensembles; the next pair was by his proto-metal project, Starebaby. Unclassified Affections is a new zag, a quartet with the unusual lineup of Peter Evans (trumpet), Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), and Miles Okazaki (guitar). This is the first album documenting this group and Evans's first appearance on the label.

In the liner notes, Weiss says that the music was written for these specific players, which is notable considering the cast: Okazaki is at least half philosopher, Brennan has liberated the vibraphone from its pianistic/percussive penitentiary, and Evans can play anything.

The album's eight compositions mix complexity and tunefulness. Every nuance was captured by Marc Urselli, the city's preeminent engineer for ambitious music. Weiss often erects skeletal accompaniment, a welcome change from the technical playalongs often heard on drummer-led albums. Interest comes from Okazaki switching between acoustic and electric instruments, Evans's extended technique, and Brennan's billowing clouds. Moods shift widely, never more than the mid-album pairing of "Mansions of Madness," which is named for and sounds like an H.P. Lovecraft story, and "Consoled without Consolations," which subverts fanfare, march, and waltz across its almost seven minutes. Each of the album's tracks is immersive, and despite the variety, cohesive.—Andrey Henkin