Denny Zeitlin: Panoply

There was a Steinway in the Zeitlin household in the outskirts of Chicago in the early 1940s. During this time Denny Zeitlin would find his way to the piano playing parental laps and sit at the keyboard, where he, he says: "I would put my little hands on their hands and go along for the ride...and I was just very intrigued by the entire panoply of sounds that were possible with that instrument." (from the 2010 AAJ interview with the pianist. Read it here).

After 80 years, it has been quite a ride: Playing in the jazz clubs in and around Chicago when he was still a teenager; making his recording debut in 1963 on flutist Jeremy Steig's Flute Fever (Columbia Records); releasing four trio albums under his own name on Columbia; an early intense foray into electro-acoustic symphonic music for the soundtrack to the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He moved back to acoustic jazz after his soundtrack experience, maintaining a medium-heat music career, in addition to his concurrent psychiatric practice and his college professorship before a fortuitous teaming in 2009 with Sunnyside Records that began with Trio In Concert.

Zeitlin's Sunnyside Records work took the music career into a higher gear. After his debut on the label, he released twelve more albums on the label and a couple more on Maxjazz—solo piano works, trio outings and electro-acoustic duet sets.

Panoply looks back into the Sunnyside archives from those recordings, presenting twelve tunes from those sessions in a nicely curated collage. The trio tunes feature Matt Wilson on drums and bassist Buster Williams; the duo tunes feature Zeitlin on keyboards and electronics and George Marsh on drums; and the solo songs come from the pianist's yearly live shows at Oakland's Piedmont Piano Company.

The set opens with a trio take on George Gershwin's "I Was Doing Alright," a lighthearted, light-stepping embrace of the Great American Songbook tradition, before moving into an edgy Zeitlin/Marsh electro mashup that is about as far from Gershwin sound as you can go. Zeitlin plays solo for Bill Lee's "Only One." It is as lovely and delicately expressed as possible, bringing a Bill Evans approach to mind.

This is how the album unfolds: a trio or solo tune that is poignant and beautiful, with moments of adventurousness and modernity thrown in (Miles Davis' "Weirdo," for example) followed by the experimental and unabashedly audacious electro-acoustic sounds of the Zeitlin/Marsh workouts, making for a compelling listening experience from a full range of Denny Zeitlin's new millennium Sunnyside Records journey.