Jazz improvisation, Cyrus Chestnut said last Saturday night, is “the art of composition at a very rapid pace, without the benefit of editing.”
That’s the kind of useful working definition a good teacher would provide, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that Chestnut recently was appointed a distinguished professor of jazz studies at Howard University. But the audience that crowded the Arts Garage this past weekend did not come for a lecture. They came for great jazz pianism, and they were not disappointed.
In 17 well-chosen songs spread over two sets, the pianist performed solo treatments of his own pieces and American Songbook standards, transforming them into mini-tone poems in which straight-ahead chorus playing alternated with experiments in coloristic effects, from the muffled bass-drum thump of a New Orleans funeral to all-out right-hand tremolos at the top of the instrument’s register.
Chestnut is one of the most important American jazz pianists working today, and his appearance in Delray Beach (which he said was his first visit to the city) was a major coup for Arts Garage. He is most reminiscent in his sense of swing and specific technical preferences to Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum; like Peterson he is fond of tenths in inner voices and a majesty of sound that leads him into fortissimo territory, and like Tatum he loves to throw off sparkling descending runs that skitter from the top to the bottom of the keyboard.
Like them, too, he is a large man — fashionably bald, he was dressed Saturday night in gray pinstripes, a pink shirt and a light blue tie he wore long — and he is able to harness considerable physical power for his work. And again like them he has a vast piano vocabulary that allows him to present familiar pieces (OK, chestnuts) in ways that seemed to take even him by surprise, such as his early reading of Vincent Youmans’ classic “Tea for Two,” which started with the verse of the 1924 standard in sheet music-simple style, and in the middle had transitioned into a series of hushed, anguished chords over a steady dotted rhythm low in the bass; it added depth and mystery to the song that was a long way from soft-shoe shuffle.
But Chestnut also has a wry sense of humor that gives his audience a feeling of being invited in to watch a musician at play. His soft, gentle take on the Jimmy Van Heusen standard “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” transitioned into, of all things, Merv Griffin’s theme for Final Jeopardy, which broke up the large house. And yet Chestnut didn’t just quote it for an easy laugh; it became the whole second half of the improvisation, which says something important about how much music he is able to find even in cultural ephemera. (Strangely enough, Griffin’s big-money game-show countdown was originally written as a lullaby for a family member, and in Chestnut’s lush, soothing reading, perhaps it finally came home to where it truly belonged.)
Also drawing sighs of pleased recognition from the audience was his take in the second set on Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which also was largely quiet and intimate, suffused with long trills over a smoothly loping bass line. It came after a vivid, punchy traversal of Cole Porter’s “It’s All Right With Me,” in hardcore fast-swing style, with strong comping in the left hand and sparkling runs in the right that seemed to bring an entire jazz trio into the room on just the Kawai.
Two of Chestnut’s pieces, “Baroque Impressions,” which draws on the Two-Part Invention in D minor of J.S. Bach and “Goliath,” which was prefaced by a treatment of Chopin’s Prelude No. 20 in C minor, demonstrated other deft things about Chestnut’s art. In the parts of “Baroque Impressions” that directly quoted the Bach, he played with a crystalline purity that suggested he would make a good Bach player if he chose to do that. “Goliath,” on the other hand, started and ended with huge, dark chords; in the beginning, the Chopin melody (itself a treatment of a Bach prelude) was forceful and tempestuous before he slid into the catchy, casual minor-key tune of “Goliath” proper. The contrasts in both cases were most striking, and demonstrated the impressive range of Chestnut’s tonal imagination.
His work on other standards Saturday night, which included Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite,” Richard Rodgers’s “Lover,” and Ray Bryant’s “Tonk,” showed how melodically minded a player Chestnut is. Not only are his own pieces straightforwardly songlike, he chooses standards with strong tunes that make for memorable initial impact and then provide a host of options for improvisation, such as the dropping chromatic tune and harmonies of “Lover.” In that regard, he is a throwback to an older kind of jazz pianism, one content to use traditional structures and approaches in a way that makes his virtuosity stand out.
And aside from the fluid runs and fleet arpeggios that were in virtually every song, Chestnut also tried some more flamboyant virtuoso attacks, such as a high-stepping back-and-forth rapid chord progression in which his left hand hammered out a pattern answered by chords in the right; his left hand was brought far up before coming down, which made it look like a series of time-lapse karate chops. He is fond of the big gesture at the end, too, building several times to stride apotheoses in which all-out right-hand tremolos gave a sonic kickline to the music he’d been playing.
It was a terrific, nourishing night of jazz piano from one of its modern masters, and audience members clearly left happier than when they came in, which Chestnut had announced as one of his goals for the night. Arts Garage needs to bring him back, either in a solo setting or with his trio. He’s one of those rare players, after so much has happened in jazz, who can remind you why it is that this music provides such a special and inimitable listening experience in the first place.