Customer Rating:  
Summary: Modern piano
Comment: Aaron Parks take a shot at defining modern piano with "Invisible Cinema". If you've heard the Terence Blanchard and Christian Scott CD's that Parks played on, this CD will feel familiar. Parks plays a relatively spare piano, and the songs sound like they're in a minor key. The relative effect is more of a quiet Vijay Iyer than Brad Mehldau. Guitarist Mike Moreno is on hand to support the song and piano playing. His few solos are very good, though. Some of the songs are rock-inspired, which means Radiohead-esque. These are more likely to have simple, repeated eighth-note lines.
This is a jazz CD which will appeal to rock fans that crossover to jazz, and any jazz fan who likes to stay current.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The New Jazz
Comment: Recently, I was lamenting about the passage of many of our jazz greats due to age, sickness, etc. I told my wife that the current generation of musicians don't seem to be interested in nuturing our beloved music with taste and technical prowess. I was wrong. There is a new group of young jazz lions out there and Aaron Parks is at the front of the the pack! In fact, on a recent trip to New York City, we were lucky enough to catch Aaron and a stunningly brillient guitarist named Mike Moreno at New York's "Jazz Standard" club. The music these young men put down was all at once beautiful and intricate. I could not believe my ears. So, I purchased the Aaron Parks CD and was not let down. I've now listened to it multiple times and it keeps getting better. It is inventive and thick with excellent playing. Buy it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: this is unusually enjoyable
Comment: One test of an album is, how many times do I want to listen to it? I listened to this one five times before I took a break. That's a lot for me. Usually I'm relieved to get through a new album so I can go back to something I really like. I switched to The Brian Blade Fellowship's Season of Changes for comparison, but I couldn't get through it before I had to go back to Invisible Cinema for another listen. There are at least four things that make this album so satisfying to me. First, there is the physical quality of the playing. Aaron Parks and Mike Moreno both have a beautiful touch, delicate, precise, and supremely confident. Second, there's a lot of variety on this album. In different places it reminds of Brad Mehldau, The Bad Plus, Radiohead, The Pat Metheny Group, world music, and more, but I like Invisible Cinema more than anything I've recently heard from these other artists. Third, Parks makes excellent use of harmonies and other ideas from progressive pop. He even gives us a great bluesy number in "Roadside Distraction" and a great folky number in "Praise." Fourth, despite the variety, the album is unified by a very strong artistic vision. Ben Ratliff in his recent "Critics' Choice" blurb questioned the clarity and consistency of Parks's leadership here, but in my opinion this is just further evidence of Ratliff's unreliability as a critic.
|
