Duke Pearson: Mosaic Select 8

Compiled from the pianist's late sixties Blue Note sessions, with a few tracks from 1970 included, there is little in jazz that bears resemblance to what we encounter on these five studio albums, the opening The Phantom in particular. Rather than the light, tipsy sway of João Gilberto's work with Stan Getz, Pearson, his decorative playing a means of insinuating the various textures to follow, was in search of a blend rather more delicately achieved, the movement of South American life with the rhythms predominant of an altogether more hectic hemisphere—or at least of American jazz.

Across these three discs are such notable talents as vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, percussionist Airto Moreira,vocalist Stella Mars, and Mickey Roker, who turns in one of the great "quietly brilliant drum performances of the sixties. His playing is full of air—rests and brief moments of silence placed around more typical downbeat accents, acting as signposts that turn the music's rhythmic patterns back upon themselves, reverberating.

Deft as his piano playing is, it's Pearson's gift for arranging that marks this as his most mature work, an ability to place a groove within a groove in the manner of Miles Davis' Osaka Hall performances, the Roses' "Fools Gold, or Gershwin's "They Can't Take That Away From Me —singular company. And even disassociated from the film, the theme from Rosemary's Baby has a way of intruding upon one's thoughts and mood like a Schubert lied or a Nick Drake instrumental—works that cannot be dissuaded. As a weird, welcome bonus, there are ten Christmas numbers, played slightly less adventurously than the surrounding tracks—naturally, one might say—but more palatable, I should think, for those who live in warmer climes, than the Yuletide offerings of the Beach Boys or Don Ho, come the season.

Copyright 2005 Discoveries / Krause Publications.

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