Holly Burke, Bill Runge & Linda Lee Thomas: Dreamride

Pianist Holly Burke put the days of the Covid quarantine to good use by spending a period of quality time with herself and her piano. The result is Dreamtime, twenty improvised vignettes. These snippets are short, heartfelt, sometimes reflective and at other times quite gregarious, and consistently beautiful. Though Burke is the composer of these solo piano tunes, the set would not have come together without collaboration. Bill Runge, one of Burke's long-time teammates, stepped in to help craft the original sketches into their final forms, before bringing in Linda Lee Thomas, the principal pianist with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, to play the finished product.

The music is wide-ranging, with a tiny three-minute concerto, "Butterfly," to "The Briny Deep," a tip of the hat to whales and other citizens of the sea, to the placid "Lily Pond," an examination of stillness and peace.

There are tangos and waltzes, presented succinctly, with a purity of expression. The pared-down aspect—twenty gear shifts in total throughout—keeps things surprising. "Elysium" is a bittersweet melodic journey with two visions of paradise, and "Monkey Puzzle Blues" brings to mind simians swinging in the high branches to mind.

Dreamride is a terrific example of Covid quarantine-induced creativity, proving much can be said with a brief, nicely crafted statement. These twenty tunes are like short stories of Raymond Carver or the Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata's palm-of-the-hand vignettes, compact tales that take in life and give expression to the many layers of the human experience, ending with "Maple," a delicate and reverent waltz dedicated to a family pet.

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