Wednesday, January 05, 2005
KRAC Captain Tom Knab put me onto Jessica Williams' "Live at Yoshi's" a few months back; my New Year's Resolution is to follow up more aggressively on his recommendations. When you think about it, piano has got to be the axe with the greatest bench strength. You could start talking about great jazz piano players today and still be listing names into next week. You would think, therefore, that there would be a plethora of albums like this: live piano trio improvisation. And yet, the list of really great albums in that vein is surprisingly short: "Sunday at the Village Vangard", "Koln Concert".... You wouldn't think it'd be so hard, but the limits of the definition--live and trio only-- make it a challenge to come up with many. I'd put this one up with Erroll Garner's "Concert by the Sea", an obvious candidate for the list that I left out deliberately so that I could establish how terrific I think "Live at Yoshi's" really is. There is everything here that we find on Garner's disc: fabulous technique, brilliant improvisation, clever quotations, wonderful song selection, wit, verve, you name it. All this, and the advantage of sounding fresh. I've been listening to it for three days now, and kicking myself that I haven't had it longer so that I could have listened to it more before now.
// posted by Bill @ 2:37 PM 
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