Aaron Strumann

The best way to describe Aaron Diehl’s new recording, The Vagabond, is that it is a quiet masterpiece. While this is thoroughly a jazz recording rooted in precedents set by Diehl’s forbearers such as Art Tatum, Mary Lou Williams, Ahmad Jamal, Roland Hanna and John Lewis, it will come as no surprise to fans of Diehl’s previous two Mack Avenue recordings that clear references are made to his background and simultaneous career as a classical music performer. The Vagabond also features Diehl’s interpretation of works “March from Ten Pieces for Piano, Op. 12” written by Russian great Sergei Prokofiev and “Piano Etude No. 16” by Philip Glass.

For the past two decades pianist Aaron Goldberg has crisscrossed the globe, spreading his music and absorbing local knowledge along the way. True to the jazz mentality, he learned to embrace serendipity as an artistic muse. Five years ago this month, in an historic chateau at the exact geographic center of France, Goldberg was reunited with an early influence. Soon a new project began to take shape. Goldberg’s latest recording, At The Edge of The World, documents this recent collaboration with drummer and percussionist Leon Parker, a brilliant innovator and performer, in a new trio along with the gifted bassist Matt Penman.

Widely acknowledged as a modern master in the aftermath of his acclaimed 2012 Mack Avenue debut, The Bespoke Man’s Narrative, 29-year-old pianist-composer Aaron Diehl ups the ante with the 2015 release Space, Time, Continuum. Diehl first documented his inclusive, across-the-timeline conception on the self-released late ?00s albums Live At Caramoor, a solo date on which he navigated the stride piano canon with deep assurance; and Live At The Players, on which he applied a broad lexicon of piano trio vocabulary to a program spanning classical music, bebop and the blues. On The Bespoke Man’s Narrative, Diehl presented original music drawing on antecedent bandleader-composers like John Lewis and Duke Ellington for strategies that facilitated individualistic performances from his unit of A-list peers.

Anomaly is a smart album, in large part because it insists on being so. Saxophonist Aaron Burnett has assembled an impressive group, most notably drummer Tyshawn Sorey, whose mentoring influence in the avant-garde certainly is apparent. But this is an album that constantly see-saws between the experimental and bop, working to balance ideas soundly, still trying to sift through countless ideas. These lengthy compositions surely convey grand concepts about the movement from bebop to post-bop and into the contemporary realm, and have no qualms about accessibility.