Craig Taborn - Piano
With Craig Taborn, a world star is once again coming to Dudelange. The Guardian newspaper described the exceptional artist as a piano phenomenon. It was with his fourth album entitled ‘Avenging Angel’ that Taborn garnered extensive international acclaim back in 2011.
CRAIG TABORN – SHADOW PLAY: PRESS-QUOTES
À chaque nouveau morceau, Craig Taborn cherche à créer un monde différent, avec une musique parfois austère et rigoureuse mais toujours généreuse. Un motif émerge et il ‘s en empare pour le developper jusqu’ à ce que les modifications successives l’aient transformé, créant une atmosphere différente et pourtant familière. […] Ce qui fascine le plus ici, au-delà de l’admiration que suscite un tel savoir-faire, c’est la mise en œuvre de cette inventivité pure par laquelle le pianiste, comme tous le grands créateurs, agit sur son matériau pour faire advenir l’incroyable. Sa carrière avançant, Taborn parvient toujours davantage à laisser libre cours au flux de son inconscient. […] Un disque loin de tout dogme qui témoigne d’un imaginaire à nul autre pareil, servi par une technique sans équivalent.
Ludovic Florin, Jazz Magazine
When Craig Taborn released ‘Avenging Angel’, his solo-piano debut on the German-based ECM label, his reputation in left-field jazz was just starting to grow. Subsequent ECM recordings ranged from alt-fusion combos to piano duets and took in both free jazz and rigorously constructed work. A decade on, his focus has sharpened, his approach is more distinct, and he is recognised as a major influence in contemporary jazz. Here he returns to solo performance with ‘Shadow Plays’, a through-improvised recital from the Mozart Hall of the Vienna Konzerthaus, recorded live in March last year. It finds the Detroit-born pianist delivering spontaneous masterworks with a majestic sense of form and captures his robust touch and uncanny sense of space in pristine sound. […] Taborn’s free-improvising aesthetic strives to give an overarching logic to the unplanned. That first piece is so artfully constructed that it seems previously composed. Impressively, he sustains that control of mood and focus throughout the set. […] Although the Taborn style overlaps with contemporary classical music, the emotional drive and pulse reverberate with jazz. The rolling left hand and repeated figures of ‘A Code with Spells’ have clear jazz roots and the album’s 18-minute title track references jazz history in passing asides.Mike Hobart, Financial Times
The adventures take many different forms. Taborn invariably makes pieces unfold without clear ‘sectional’ marking so that changes of atmosphere as well as structure can be disarming and exciting. There is a fluid quality to the material here as if a rhythmic line was a succession of waves rushing back and forth that blend into brilliantly distilled, paired-down motifs that have contrastingly rugged, physical timbres, like a rock emerging from water. Sometimes Reichian repetitions are set against melancholic, slow melodic bass lines that have an enormous emotional weight, as one note at a time drops into misty, cavernous spaces. However, the tension is also created by very controlled shifts in volume as well as harmony, and if stillness, composure, restraint and omission are crucial to the endeavor then Taborn also fashions some daringly muscular, staccato grooves. […] all the stylistic range and deeply personal synthesis of many musical histories conspire to make Craig Taborn a very unique 21st century artist.
Kevin Le Gendre, Jazzwise
