Piano In The Foreground

Description

It is universally recognized by his peers as a monument of African American music that Duke Ellington, having achieved total stylistic autonomy, approached the turning point of the 1960s. On one hand, he continued his orchestral experiments, notably engaging in very personal adaptations for big band of great classics of Western classical music ("Peer Gynt" after Edward Grieg, "The Nutcracker" after Tchaikovsky). At the same time, Duke Ellington began to dedicate some rare and precious sessions to the perilous exercise of the piano/bass/drums trio. Less known than the legendary "Money Jungle" recorded in 1962 with Charles Mingus and Max Roach, "Piano In The Background," released the previous year, is the other great album of this period that offers the opportunity to discover the decidedly modernist options of the pianist outside the lush setting of his orchestra. Accompanied by a pneumatic rhythm section featuring bassist Aaron Bell or Jimmy Wood and drummer Sam Woodyard, Ellington, on a repertoire consisting of a few immortal standards (an astonishing version of Gershwin's "Summertime"!) and a selection of his own compositions, reveals here the full extent of his instrumental talents, developing in an elliptical style, skillfully discontinuous and willingly dissonant, a perfectly singular discourse — both rooted in tradition and subtly avant-garde.