Eliane Elias: Everything I Love (Blue Note)
Clearly influenced by the father of bop piano, Bud Powell, Elias has taken this and other sources into forming her own style. In the process she has transmuted Powell's unforgiving intensity into something sunnier, more ebullient, supported by a formidable technique and no lack of ideas to go with it. It's expressed here with impressive elan in two trio settings, one with, on bass and drums respectively, Marc Johnson and Jack DeJohnette, the other with Christian McBride and Carl Allen. The Johnson-DeJohnette team offer more subtle dialogue with the piano - Johnson is superb - while the skilled McBride-Allen pair are more straight-ahead. Familiar material, no fresh territory invaded, but all done with an irresistibly accomplished joie de vivre.
- Ray Comiskey
Andrew Hill: Grass Roots (Blue Note)
Hill is a respected, thoroughly individual pianist and composer whose work, excluding the classic Blue Note album, Point Of Departure, with Eric Dolphy, has only fitfully appeared on CD. That's reason enough for this reissue of two late-1960s sessions to be noteworthy, particularly since one of them features trumpeter Lee Morgan and, especially, tenor Booker Ervin in fine form. Hill's piano, by Herbie Nicholls out of Thelonious Monk, is an acquired taste, but the complexities are here tempered by more accessibility than usual. The second session, with trumpeter Woody Shaw and tenor Frank Mitchell, effectively a "rehearsal" for the first, is somewhat less striking, though not without merit. And both reveal, for Hill, atypically visceral, earthy performances.
- Ray Comiskey