CD ECM Records Craig Taborn: Avenging Angel

2011

Craig Taborn - pian



“Avenging Angel” is Craig Taborn’s distinguished contribution to the great solo piano tradition at ECM, a powerful, purposeful and rigorous album, which rises to the challenges of the format and transcends them. The disc explores the textural dimensions of sound, builds new structures, uncovers a rugged lyricism. Recorded in the optimal acoustics of the recital room at Lugano’s Studio RSI, with Manfred Eicher producing, it’s Taborn’s first disc under his own name for ECM, following on from inspired sessions with Roscoe Mitchell, Evan Parker, David Torn and Michael Formanek.

That album – a clutch of compact interrogations, unpremeditated but structurally coherent – reflects Mr. Taborn’s galactically broad interests, along with his multifaceted technique. You might hear flashes of 20th-century classical music: Ligeti perhaps, or Messiaen. You might hear echoes of Mr. Jarrett and Mr. Bley (and ECM’s founder-producer, Manfred Eicher). In the album’s obsession with permutation, you might hear shades of electronic music. […] At the heart of Mr. Taborn’s enterprise is a fascination with pure sound. The album is full of moments where a note hangs sharply in the air, and you hear the gathering overtones, the vibrations of the strings.
Nate Chinen, New York Times / International Herald Tribune

“Avenging Angel” runs as broad as you might expect, lining up moods and rhythmic-melodic strategies of completely different orders: straight and processional, bobbing and weaving, staccato bursts and milelong notes. It contains improvisation, sometimes two-handed, and it lives on the intersection of a bunch of post-Impressionist western musical traditions. […] And so, finally, you can hear 360 degrees of his touch.
Ben Ratliff, New York Times

Avenging Angel is much more private and detailed exploration of the sonics of the piano, but if that sounds like a scarily ascetic pursuit, Taborn’s genius (there’s no other word for it) makes a world of whispered, wide-spaced figures, ringing overtunes, evaporating echoes and glowering contrapuntal cascades as absorbing as if he were playing bebop’s greatest hits. Some pieces slowly evolve as sporadically tapped treble notes ring out against quietly jagged chords, some are keyboard-sweeping torrents in which jazz phrases deviously lurk and wriggle, some foreground high sounds struck so hard that the aim seems to be to purge them of tonality, while others do the opposite and lose themselves in subtleties of texture, echo and harmonics.
John Fordham, The Guardian

With conceptual specificity providing its distinct approach at a time when so many pianists are exploring the solo context, „Avenging Angel“ stands well above most. As exhilarating as it is serene, and as evocatively melodic as it is unsettlingly recondite, it’s a masterpiece of invention and evocation that places Taborn squarely amongst those other esteemed pinaists who’ve contributed to ECM’s pantheon of significant solo recordings.
John Kelman, All About Jazz

“Avenging Angel” is an experiment in sound and silence. While brief melodic ideas underpin many of the pieces, equally central to the aesthetic is the actual sound – the reverberations of hammered strings, the oscillations, the durations of sustains. This is delicacy taken to new levels.
Steve Greenlee, Jazztimes

Listen to Avenging Angel a few times and, remarkably, the music becomes your special friend. Each piece imparts a different mood: I heard echoes of an old-fashioned children’s music box, quirky Eric Satie-like minimalism, film noir foreboding, serene solitary meditation, liquid Debussyesque ripples, dogged gambols, stately resolve, meaningful wanderin – in other words the gamut.
Juan Rodriguez, Montreal Gazette

Texture and dynamics are the key to the success of the album […] He weaves small improvisations into thoughtful statements, not in a grandiose or bombastic way, but in a manner that allows the music and ideas to flow through him in an unimpeded manner. But he also knows hot to up the ante as well, building the music into swirling two-handed lines that show the manual dexterity he is capable of.
Tim Niland, All About Jazz

Taborn has always been interested in the language of the instrument itself, the possiblities of its tonalities, spaces, textures, echoes, etc. The 13 pieces here, recorded on a gorgeous Steinway piano in Lugano, Switzerland, elaborate magnificently on all of those notions and more, without sounding overly ponderous or studied. These pieces range widely; each has its own motivation, form, frame, and intention; each arrives at a different destination. […] Avenging Angel is not an intellectual exerciese, it is a major contribution to the actual language of the piano as an improvisational instrument: its 13 pieces feel like a suite: seamless, economical, original, and visionary.
Thom Jurek, All Music

It’s Taborn at his risk-taking best, alive in glowing abstract harmony, explosive rhythm and attention to sound in its innermost detail.
David R. Adler, Jazztimes

Structurally, the set casts its net far and wide, taking in stealthy tone poems, spectral melodic themes and sprightly rhythmic carousels, but the overriding impression is that Taborn the musician is channeling many sources from both art and pop culture. “Avenging Angel” is essentially a triumph for its richness of content as well as its distillation of ideas and attention to detail.
Kevin le Gendre, Jazzwise