Chabrol Noir (2016)

Chabrol Noir CD of the Week! All About Jazz Italia **** by Alberto Bazzurro

Known to be passionate about cinema, Ran Blake gives us one of his most significant works and passionate exploring the universe of one of his great loves, Claude Chabrol, referred since cover, scopertamente hitchcockiana, disk evokes deftly expressive universe. The album has as discounted even lead the piano of Blake, without accompanying any (if not some effect generated by himself) in ten of seventeen total songs (and in seven of the first eight, and eight of the top ten, to give an immediate clear imprinting at the opera, a declaration of intent even more net) and for the rest paired with a single partner, which is almost always the tenor sax of Ricky Ford, which has the privilege of riding in solitude the penultimate episode of the disc, “Nada.” Even on the slope compositive, Blake makes part of the lion: eleven themes bear his signature, combined with pages of Johannes Brahms, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Michel Legrand and others.

Since the first notes you breathe an atmosphere elegant and sharer, without emphasis but with the right concentration. Each episode (the vast majority do not exceed two and a half minutes) you feel as part of a whole, valuable in itself but also as a vehicle toward what will be immediately after. The bubbling tenor of Ford, which joins for the first time to Blake in the fourth song, the brahmsiano “Vier Ernste Gesange,” at the beginning almost gives the feeling of squeal, then the balance is aggiustano, and periodicals duets plan/content appear as the intermediate stages, the rendez-vous, that the pianist is hereby grants to exit from its shell.

A little impettito is against the single episode with the presence of voice, clear lyrical setting, just before the mentioned tenoristico monologue, where Ford can finally give of Piglio (briefly, however) to their bollori (never strabordanti, however), before a new and wider plane only on the notes of a famous theme of Legrand. Disc between the best of this first part of 2016, there is no doubt. Track Listing: Cemetery; Midnight Snow; The Secret of Madame Louise; Vier Ernste Gesange (Fatality); Bells Of Doom; Wedding Singer; Helene’s Walk Home; cause for alarm (Fieldtrip); Garvey’s Ghost; The Nights of Tremolat; Love Le Lamentin; Emergency Queues; Balloon Ecstasy; Les grognards; I’m going to see my Son; Nada; Watch What Happens (From The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg).

Personnel: Ran Blake: Piano, effects; Ricky Ford: tenor sax; Dominique Eade: voice in “I’m going to see my Son”. Source: http://italia.allaboutjazz.com/ran-blake-chabrol-noir/