Chris Rottmayer: Being

One thing is for sure. If a listener comes upon a recording based on the music of Mulgrew Miller and Woody Shaw, there are unlimited possibilities for a harmonic education. Both players were revered for their sophistication and the beauty of the melodies they created. So it hardly seems odd that someone, here pianist Chris Rottmayer, would have made an academic study of what they were doing. Ordinarily, even an academic might think "what a frightful idea," but Rottmayer understood that this was an account of how the magic happened. And so a student of the music gets a rich sample of what Miller and Shaw did. That is the good part. The difficulty is that so much is going on that a diligent listener can very well get hung up on listening to one track. A confession is in order. It happens to even hardened cynics. As the song says, "it could happen to you."

Just as a sample, listen to the opening track "On The Street Where Woody Lives." It takes trumpet player Russ Johnson and Rottmayer virtually no time to get into one of Shaw's most characteristic licks, a phrase based on a minor pentatonic scale. On the other hand, one of Mulgrew Miller's distinctive devices was the use of the diminished scale; hang around for Rottmayer's solo and there it is. So if someone does nothing more than listen to one track of this recording—and it does not require a lifetime of conservatory training to pick these out—some of the mystery to why Miller and Shaw sounded as they did is cleared up, if just a little. Of course, a serious musician is going to hear all sorts of other things involving intervallic structures and melodic patterns. Enjoy.

Then again, someone can just forget all that stuff and just appreciate the music. And, all in all, that is probably the best thing to do. Tunes like "Ballerina Dance" and "Pigalle" bring together the efforts of a talented group of musicians, including the master, bassist Rufus Reid. Trying to figure out chords and such on these is a bit of philistinism. A number of tunes were inspired by Rottmayer's wanderings in Paris, another game for cognoscenti who want to play "figure out the program."

Sometimes it is just better to listen to people play and not worry about what they are doing, or the state of their chops, and the rest. Art Blakey said jazz washed off the dust of everyday life. No better way to characterize what happens after spending time with the legacy that Miller and Shaw left us, and which Rottmayer has thoughtfully codified in this "academic" work, deftly rendered by superior musicians.