The young pianist Aaron Diehl is putting his talent against the odds. What hes up to with his trio, which played at Smalls on Tuesday night, isnt new in the temporal sense or new in the art-movement sense, which is to say it isnt confrontational or puzzling.
It was a set that sounded as if it had arrived in a time capsule from before the 1960s game changers of jazz piano, Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner, and thats strange coming from a musician in his mid-20s. It was clean, delicate, highly arranged and not outwardly virtuosic. In some ways, perhaps, he wasnt pleading his case.
But that made you listen a bit harder. In his trio, with the bassist David Wong and the drummer Quincy Davis, you can recognize how much hes studied, but he doesnt feed his hard work back to you with any stress. He likes chamber dynamics. You hear a lot of Duke Ellington, particularly the quiet Ellington of the record Piano Reflections. You hear a lot of John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet. (The trio played a version of the quartets 10-minute Ronde Suite in its entirety this in tiny Smalls, on a Tuesday night, at 7:30.) You also hear a little bit of stride piano, a style he doesnt use often enough to make it a parlor trick or a crutch. And youre also struck by more general qualities: the musics counterintuitive combination of hard swing and restraint, Mr. Diehls careful keyboard touch, and space, lots of space.
It was a set that sounded as if it had arrived in a time capsule from before the 1960s game changers of jazz piano, Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner, and thats strange coming from a musician in his mid-20s. It was clean, delicate, highly arranged and not outwardly virtuosic. In some ways, perhaps, he wasnt pleading his case.
But that made you listen a bit harder. In his trio, with the bassist David Wong and the drummer Quincy Davis, you can recognize how much hes studied, but he doesnt feed his hard work back to you with any stress. He likes chamber dynamics. You hear a lot of Duke Ellington, particularly the quiet Ellington of the record Piano Reflections. You hear a lot of John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet. (The trio played a version of the quartets 10-minute Ronde Suite in its entirety this in tiny Smalls, on a Tuesday night, at 7:30.) You also hear a little bit of stride piano, a style he doesnt use often enough to make it a parlor trick or a crutch. And youre also struck by more general qualities: the musics counterintuitive combination of hard swing and restraint, Mr. Diehls careful keyboard touch, and space, lots of space.
