Piano Rhythm

Melvyn Price - Rhythm And Blues (1974) {Wax Poetics WPR004 rel 2008}
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© 1974, 2008 Wax Poetics Records | WPR004
Jazz / Jazz Funk / Soul Jazz / Congas

Michigan expatriate musician Melvyn Price recorded three records in the early 1970s in his adopted home of Sweden that have become classics in their own right. Price, a trombonist and conguero, recorded two rhythm albums for ballet dancers called Jazzbalettrytmer (Jazz Ballet Rhythm) in 1970 and Rhytmer II in 1971. They were quite popular in Sweden – despite being orchestrated by primarily rhythm instruments. Encouraged, he attended Stockholm's University College for music education where he studied composition.

Freddy Kempf and Andrew Litton with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra here join forces to present a disc of works by George Gershwin. Rhapsody in Blue was originally arranged by Ferde Grofé for jazz band before being orchestrated for symphony orchestra. Here Kempf and the Bergen Philharmonic play this original version. Concerto in F was a commission for Gershwin to write a ‘proper’ piano concerto, but still takes the rhythms, melodic structures and bluesy harmonies of popular music.

First there was rhythm - pulsing, driving, primal rhythm. And a new word in musical terminology: Barbaro. As with sticks on skins, so with hammers on strings. The piano as one of the percussion family, the piano among the percussion family. The first and second concertos were written to be performed that way. But the rhythm had shape and direction, myriad accents, myriad subtleties. An informed primitivism. A Baroque primitivism. Then came the folkloric inflections chipped from the music of time: the crude and misshapen suddenly finding a singing voice. Like the simple melody - perhaps a childhood recollection - that emerges from the dogged rhythm of the First Concerto's second movement. András Schiff plays it like a defining moment - the piano reinvented as a singing instrument. His "parlando" (conversational) style is very much in Bartók's own image. But it's the balance here between the honed and unhoned, the brawn and beauty, the elegance and wit of this astonishing music that make these readings special.