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Denny Zeitlin: Stairway to the Stars
by Dan McClenaghan
Pianist Denny Zeitlin's Stairway to the Stars recording sparkles to life on the familiar Great American Songbook jewel, “There Will Never Be Another You." This version has everything that the best piano trio efforts offer: elegance, inspired three-way interplay, a vivacious groove--thanks to drummer Matt Wilson and bassist Buster Williams--and Zeitlin's always supple touch and endless inventiveness. Zeiltin, has rolled in a creative high gear since his teaming with Sunnyside Records in 2009, beginning with In Concert with ...
Continue ReadingDenny Zeitlin: Both/And
by Dan McClenaghan
Pianist Denny Zeitlin has the distinction--among many others--of having written one of the loveliest of love songs: “Love Theme From Invasion of the Bodysnatchers." The tune can be heard in its unadorned beauty on Zeitlin's Precipice (Sunnyside Records, 2010), the recording of an extraordinarily beautiful and adventurous solo concert. The original version of the tune, from the soundtrack of the 1978 movie, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978)--a masterful remake of the classic 1954 science fiction film--was Zeitlin's lone effort at ...
Continue ReadingDenny Zeitlin: Wherever You Are--Midnight Moods for Solo Piano
by Dan McClenaghan
There's something magnificent about a top-level artist alone with a piano, immersed in a mood of quiet nights, under quiet stars. Denny Zeitlin, a versatile music maker who wrote the electro-acoustic symphonic soundtrack for the 1978 remake of the science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, has released a handful of excellent trio albums on the MaxJazz and Sunnyside labels, but since 2010, has concentrated on solo perforomances.Precipice (Sunnyside Records, 2010) and Labyrinth (Sunnyside Records, 2011) are ...
Continue ReadingDenny Zeitlin: Labyrinth
by Dan McClenaghan
Denny ZeitlinLabyrinthSunnyside Records2011 Pianist Denny Zeitlin recorded a handful of fine albums for Columbia Records in the mid-1960s, forward-leaning trio affairs showcasing his often cerebral but always approachable technique and his superb songwriting. This was at a time when he was studying medicine. He became, and continues to be, a practicing psychiatrist and university professor, so something--jazz would be the expected pick--could easily have taken a back seat. But while Dr. ...
Continue ReadingDenny Zeitlin: Labyrinth
by Raul d'Gama Rose
To Denny Zeitlin the piano is several instruments rolled into one. It is a percussion instrument, struck by fingers and all manner of objets d'art. Together with his feet, which depress the pedals as if they were instrumental peripherals in themselves, Zeitlin makes masterful use of them to split, carve, bend and hang notes. Zeitlin might also make the piano sound like a lute or a harp. And then there are his arms and fingers, that make oceanic use of ...
Continue ReadingDenny Zeitlin: Nothing Halfway
by Dan McClenaghan
San Francisco-based jazz pianist Denny Zeitlin--aka Dr. Dennis Zeitlin, Psychiatrist--boasts a music career that spans more than fifty years. He began, at a tender young age, playing professionally in the early fifties in his home town of Chicago. He was, very early in his life, interested in the fields of medicine and music, and he has been able to navigate career paths in both disciplines with great success.He has recorded more than thirty albums, beginning with a series ...
Continue ReadingDenny Zeitlin: Precipice: Solo Piano Concert
by Raul d'Gama Rose
The singular mission of Denny Zeitlin continues with Precipice, the recorded document of a concert in January, 2008 at Ralston Hall, Santa Barbara, California. The experience is at once predictably exquisite as it creates a state of a type of suspended animation, floating with utter weightless abandon, as composer and pianist, Zeitlin flies over the edge of its proverbial cliff seduced by the thunderous cascade of music. This is how the music builds up to that frenetic quantum energy by ...
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