Self Portraits - Richie Beirach

Apr

21

Self Portraits - Richie Beirach

≡ Category: 1990s, Avant-Guarde, Essential, Music Reviews, Post Bop |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING

Rating:

I wouldn’t fault anyone for mistaking the music on Self Portraits, Richie Beirach’s set of solo piano pieces, as modern classical music. Many of the techniques and harmonies are taken straight from the classical avant guarde. Much of the time, the rhythms are free, although now and then Beirach breaks into strict time, and when he does, his metronomic control is startling in it’s precision. You could set an atomic clock by this guy. The same precision is apparent in his touch. He uses the volume and sustain pedals with the delicacy of a surgeon, plucks and strokes the strings inside the piano, and gently strokes or pounds the keys, with every gradation in between.

Beirach’s playing tends to be on the cold and clinical side, which can be a problem if he is not playing with someone who wears his emotions on his sleeve, like Dave Liebman. For example, on his 1982 solo date Breathing of Statues, the title tells you exactly what the music sounds like–cold, dead marble. That may have been Beirach’s intention, but it doesn’t exactly make for a stimulating listen.

This time around, his playing is still icy and calculated, but there are emotions, like bitterness, pride, yearning, and even a certain strain of dry humor.

The programmatic Falling Off My Bike starts out with a simple pentatonic scale, up and down, up and down, each note doubled with another a whole tone higher than the first, sounding for all the world like an idiot schoolboy pounding a keyboard to irritate his piano teacher. Then the scale splinters into what seems like a thousand shards, each note taking on a rhythm independent of the others, descending into complete chaos before crashing with a resounding thud. This pattern repeats with many variations before the piece closes with a simple V-I dominant to tonic progression, almost as if mocking the preceding frantic complexity.

A Quiet Normal Life is another example of Beirach’s sense of humor. For this piece, he has taken a page from modern composers like John Cage, treating the piano by dampening some of the strings with paper, thumbtacks and other objects, to accentuate the percussive qualities of the instrument. He strikes the keys with repetitive rhythms, runs scales, plays parallel chord clusters in ascending or descending patterns with every conceivable combination of treated and untreated piano. The result is anything but normal, but it’s guaranteed to wake you up.

Apprentice/Master is about that relationship and the emotions that go along with it. First up is the apprentice. He or she is hopeful, hesitant to offer opinions, respectful of the master. Beirach communicates these qualities with a lovely diatonic melody played rubato, with many harmonic suspensions. Then it’s time for the master to speak. His is the voice of experience. There is more dissonance and a more melancholy take on the same themes before the piece briefly returns to the more gentle tone of the apprentice, bringing the piece to a close.

Although Self Portraits is not the most accessible solo piano album out there, I think it’s up there with Keith Jarrett’s Facing You and Tete Montoliu’s Songs For Love in terms of quality, which merely makes it one of the greatest solo piano recordings of all time.