‘Panoply’: The Arc of Denny Zeitlin’s Wayfaring, Waterfalling Jazz
(with apologies to K-drama subtitles)
We listen for the startling and the pleasing, settling into a comfortable groove in between. Chicago-born/Bay-Area-based veteran jazz keyboardist/composer Denny Zeitlin is able to play both ends with the ebullience of ragtime and the distant, eerie sound effect of a thrilling, modern score.
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1978],” anyone?
His latest, June 14, 2024 recording on Sunnyside Records is aptly called Panoply, a previously unreleased collection of favorite live/studio performances — solo, duo, trio — from the past decade.
“The solo pieces are from a 2012 concert at Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland, CA. The trio selections were recorded in 2019 at NYC’s Mezzrow Jazz Club with Buster Williams [on bass] and Matt Wilson [on drums]. The duo free improvisations span a decade of recording in my home studio with drummer George Marsh, 2013-2023.”
The pieces jump from pleasantly melodic and vibrant, to a horse of a different color — one more suited to Zeitlin’s later interest in diffusing acoustic matters with electronic cocktails that call to mind an anticipatory, climbing Hitchcock thriller…one where the damsel throws caution to the wind to face her deepest fears.
Let’s jump in.
Buoyant music playing
Zeitlin is a master of swinging for the fences. In George Gershwin’s cover, “I Was Doing All Right,” he typically brews his heady concoction — his signature tiger prowling the streets prowess — in between the familiar melodic lines of intro, chorus, and finish.
There’s an insistent, yet gauzy reference to Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” chorus (heaven, I’m in heaven) wanting to play out in his keyboard strokes, when they’re not playing hide ‘n seek with the bass and brush drum accompaniment.
The trio manages to be light and lively, and richly modern.
The unsettling, redlight-greenlight vagaries of “Excursion” will be your favorite, too. Immediately, an electronic synth vibe fiddles with the wine-aged tempo, stretching marshmallow time, manipulating keys until the listener’s hearing things that go bump ‘n grind in the night — an escapist disco far into the 25th century, where humankind has no more need for fleshy, awkward analog things.
Like Gershwin, Zeitlin and Marsh make the classical and jazz clash, obstruct, and tunnel in an outward tornado, going up and out, toying with the undercurrents of melody, ‘80s reverb romanticism, and a loosely improvisational structure that invites cerebral and ceremonial mind-to-soul gatherings.
Zeitlin especially finds other-worldly orchestral magic, seeming to reinvent and resurface past genre connections that syncopate, separate, and shimmer. The manipulation and depth of his electronic keyboard wizardry fashions entirely new instruments to the naked ear, sounds, strokes, and musicality never before put together.
“Cheek to Cheek’s” heaven, I’m in heaven chorus stubbornly threatens to make a repeat appearance in Ray Noble’s “Cherokee” jazz standard (which has inspired countless, late-night jam sessions). Only in this version, Zeitlin half-buries the gist of his ragtime beginnings to free-form all over the do-wop puddles.
His solo is one of practiced artistry and natural roaming curiosity for where the tune can go, beyond its time-honored scope. A five-car pile-on, if you will, of jazz ideas, that still seems to make sense and sound completely composed.
Zeitlin’s Wilson/Williams trio inserts bubbly, fractionated, negative-ionosphere wavering…a tearing away…in Miles Davis’s “Weirdo,” over a syncopated, mid-tempo swing. The upswing that sounds like a downturn magnifies the difference, keeping the suede cover undeniably original.
If Zeitlin could pull the music inside-out, like a t-shirt, “Limburger Pie and Beeswax Crust” would result. The pianist feasts on the satisfying feel of thundering — up and down, over and out — a cheerily downward slant, of filling an empty platter full of musical fruit, without giving up the early-jazz melody.
Zeitlin goes from the hint of one song to another, both distantly from the past, on “Johnny Come Lately [Billy Strayhorn],” a solo-to-trio imperative…a waterfall of notes before drummer and bassist fall in with their own racing, rampant-parallel lines.
Each piano note almost comes unglued, rushing in a flurry before tapering off with a squeal.
Straight-ahead jazz bending at the edges in Zeitlin’s spirited-split-infinity construct.
Pensive music playing
Zeitlin’s solo in Bill Lee’s “Only One” expands, as with the breath of a tired, restless traveler in search of gold — in relationships and for real. This tune serves as a thoughtful, acoustic piano-led respite meant for gently opening old wounds, reassessing…rustling, rolling, resolving. It’s so organic and visceral, you can almost feel his fingertips light on the keys, the keys crackling to life in response.
The double-down reverb-echo of “Regret” recalls the past in acacia-wood, beryl-ghost-seafoam splendor. Zeitlin and Marsh apply their electronica mindset judiciously, so you get a feel for the lacey-billowy allure of what could’ve been in tantric strings, boombox cellophane wrap, and insistent fold-over Tourette’s piano, without being overwhelmed by, What the hell is this?
Minor point, but Wilson’s swirling, tip-tapping brush strokes in Axel Stordahl and Paul Weston’s “I Should Care” (11th on the list of a dozen) absolutely does not reference a Charlie Brown Christmas. How could it, when Zeitlin’s countering the forested measures with a decidedly romantic, early 20th century tone on tome, steering clear of that easy wintry stereotype?
Williams adds to the lost-love romanticism on his brooding bass.
But it is Zeitlin’s wandering, touchstone narrative that turns this standard into an absolute stunner of a residual heartbreaker…a love song for the ages.
What he does inside the melodic lines, carving deeper meaning — on two notes instead of one, lifting forever clouds, jumbling up into one another in a layered liquid soup — elevates this tune, and himself as an artist, to greatness.
Quirky music playing
Zeitlin and Marsh give and take liberties with the melody and structure of “Ambush,” a cross-hybrid of sound effects and soundtrack — fitting for, perhaps, a sci-fi mystery about the hazards of close encounters time travel with your younger self, during the part where the leading man searches for the villain in the dark, knowing what’s about to happen, in spite of himself.
So much is going on in this tune, just barely skirting the musical bounds of jazz and even bluesy-pop. Yet, all of it impossibly musical just the same.
Zeitlin holds the tune spell-bound, dipping generously into his bag of electronica tricks, to evoke mood, an odd yearning melancholy (dig the Broadway horns cutting through the circuitry) with Marsh’s quicksilver death march that comes and goes, and the fades, fiddling with the tracks, dropping huge swaths, bits, and bops of a Machiavellian time when Audrey Hepburn gasped at diamonds on velvet to a lush Mancini serenade.
“Music Box” holds back 3/4ths of the music, to let the Zeitlin/Marsh duo filter what their hearts remember of Sunday mornings in the kitchen with grandma, Victrola radio on, daisy curtains fluttering daintily in the background, absorbing sonic landscapes from pieces of April through August, when thoughts turn to freedom and fun.
Fully improvised and evocative of better times behind white picket fences, “Music Box” nevertheless stretches the finite of not only time and space — Zeitlin’s predilection — but what constitutes music, one trickling note into a thousand, compounded for maximum effect.
Mancini’s big band lingers awhile here in this wide tandem of sticky steps, gossamer flights — caught in glowing fervor — and an ever-present sense of grousing, jazz-noir anticipation, inherent in any primordial revelation.
“A Raft, A River” — adrift and aloft on invisible, silky, metallic threads — presents as the clanging, saturating one-act cinema of pure imagination, doggedly chasing its desolate coherence.
Wordless piano treads on an Indian-Japanese sidewinder (pulling those invisible strings), hastening military-style proxy beats, intensifying on a widening gap…these lend naturally to a picture of the title, personified:
Rail-split horizon, bleeding red on concrete, long after a brutal midnight storm, lost and found at sea, shredded paper lanterns bobbing with the foreign aid of long-dead promises…
Zeitlin and Marsh handle the rest…
Denny Zeitlin doesn’t play it straight, not without a few miraculous detours that force the listener to reevaluate what music really is and how it’s supposed to make you feel. His operation touches both the heart and taps into the inner workings of the mind, when firing on all cylinders.
Panoply represents the arc of his jazz quite well, for fan and newbie alike.