Cliff Korman: Urban Tracks

As ever, Urban Tracks finds pianist, arranger-composer and scholar Cliff Korman alchemizing, jazzifying choros and Brasilifying jazz tunes to create his own distinctive arrangements. Mood Ingênuo: Pixinguinha Meets Duke Ellington with Paulo Moura (Jazzheads, 1999), Brasilified (Tiger Turn, 2022) and Bossas and Ballads (Tiger Turn, 2024) are among other examples in his discography. He recorded Urban Tracks in his hometown, New York, with Brazilian drummer Rafael Barata and NYC bassist Harvie S, but these days Korman lives in Rio de Janeiro, performing and teaching at the Federal University's Villa-Lobos Institute and working with the Instituto Paulo Moura.

The album focuses mainly on original arrangements of existing repertoire, standards and lesser-known items, including beautiful versions of two pieces by Radamés Gnattali, the esteemed 20th-century popular and classical arranger-composer and founding director of the orchestra for Brazil's Radio Nacional. The set opens with Gnattali's spirited "Cheio de Malicia" (1958). The trio radiates a confident virtuosity and joie de vivre that is anything but "full of malice." Alone at the piano, Korman offers an exquisitely kaleidoscopic rendering of Gnattali's "Canhoto" (1943) that brings out the dancing grace of the original choro and its romantic ethos, then moves fluidly into more of a jazz bag.

After a pensive piano introduction, Luiz Bonfa's "Manha de Carnaval," one of several highlights, is enlivened by a feel that is more muscular than melancholy. There is still plenty of room for reflection, particularly in solo segments, but the arrangement eschews mawkishness, going as far as to close with a Picardy third, a 'happy' major mode ending. On the jazz side, the album includes solid performances of a subtly recolored (briefly re-melodized, surprisingly) "All the Things You Are," a straight-ahead rendition of Benny Golson's "Whisper Not" and a lightly swinging marchinha carnavalesca setting of Wayne Shorter's "Fall." (Check the YouTube, bottom of page.)

Korman positions his sensitive solo reading of Caetano Veloso's "Trilhos Urbanos" as the penultimate track, where it functions as a kind of inhalation before the ultimate release. Veloso's lyric speaks of his hometown—Santo Amaro in Bahía—in terms that are both mythic and personal, but it is easy to imagine a resonance that might have had for Korman—recording on the 1896 Steinway at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn—as expressed in the lines "vão passando os anos e eu não te perdi, meu trabalho é te traduzir" ("the years go by and I don't forget you, my work is to translate you"). The program comes to a close with a wonderfully animated ensemble performance of Korman's vibrant "Saudade do Paulo," the only original composition, ending the date with a joyous tribute to Moura, his lifelong friend and colleague, the musician who first introduced him to the wonders of Brazilian music.

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