Stanley Cowell - June Teens - Japan CD

Credits:

Stanley Cowell

Description:

Stanley Cowell's hands, as depicted on the jacket, are beautifully large, given to him to play the piano. Just watching those ten long fingers move organically and with dizzying speed across the keyboard, one realizes that he is the greatest master of the traditional Negro piano art today. Even when he plays in an avant-garde and sharp style, he never loses his nostalgic warmth, which may be a kind of "breaking the mold" that only those who have firmly mastered the traditional "mold" are allowed to do. This long-awaited solo album was realized after eight years of work by French producer Philippe Gelmetti, who fell in love with him. Invited to a studio in the south of France, Cowell confronts the Hamburg Steinway, which responds immediately to his every demand, and freely improvises while enjoying the rainbow of colors that shine through the delicate touch of the famous instrument. Juneteenth" refers to June 19, Emancipation Day, and 2015 is its 150th anniversary. (The booklet is a collection of rare photographs of the period.) Cowell has revised the suite he wrote for orchestra to solo piano specifications (2-11) and added newly written pieces (1,12,13).It is very enjoyable, as is typical of Cowell, that familiar melodies appear here and there in his innovative playing. The left hand melody played as the bottom line of the ultra-modern improvisation in (1) is "We Shall Overcome," which symbolizes the Civil Rights Movement, and it is a surprise from the very beginning. The song (4) is a collage of songs sung by the two armies during the Civil War, and in (6), Billy Holiday's singing denouncing racial discrimination is heard on the piano, creating a strange subliminal effect. Even those of us who live our daily lives in places unrelated to black history are given a glimpse of the social origins that gave birth to jazz. The history of our ancestors as narrated on the piano by the master pianist Cowell is a modern art of piano solo bound with French esprit.