It’s hard to believe that drummer/composer Dafnis Prieto is celebrating 25 years of being in the United States. In his early days, he was a hot-shot gun for hire bringing his propulsive beats to the work of Michel Camilo, Chucho and Bebo Valdés, Henry Threadgil, Steve Coleman, Eddie Palmieri and many others. But over the years, he has also become a gifted composer and bandleader. With all that promise and a work ethic to match, he received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, an award that gave him the freedom to pursue his grand ambitions, including starting his own Dafnison Music label — where he has released eight stellar projects including his big band recording Back To The Sunset, for which he earned a Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album in 2019. But Prieto thinks about music in many settings. With his latest, 3 Sides Of The Coin, the Cuban-born drummer brings back his Sí o Sí Quartet (meaning Yes or Yes) for a sizzling set of complex compositions that will get you thinking as well as up and dancing. Everything on this recording sounds easy until you stop to focus on what each member of this terrific band is playing. Along with Prieto on drums, Peter Apfelbaum plays saxophones, Martin Bejerano is on piano and Ricky Rodriguez lights up the electric bass. All are top-flight musicians and artists with the necessary skills and chemistry to navigate the tricky rhythms and layers cooked up by Prieto. Let’s start with “Conga Ingenua,” translated as Naive Conga. It’s a tip of the hat to the music Prieto grew up with, but with many wonderful twists and turns. Prieto establishes the groove with a march that takes on slightly ominous tones as the melody kicks in with Bejerano’s piano. But then the piece lights up, with this tight-knit ensemble delivering a truly inspiring chase through an 8-minute, 24-second adventure of dramatic changes in tempo, dynamics and feel. Apfelbaum’s work on soprano here is divine; Bejerano is so tasteful, so fluid; and Rodriguez locks in and fills with grace, power and creativity. All the while, here and throughout this album, Prieto expertly drives the group from behind the drum kit. The tune “Two Sides Of The Coin” splits between two themes (but going back to the title, the third side of this coin is perception) and slides in as a driving wall of sound. “Naive,” with its lovely bass solo intro, brings a little quiet majesty to the proceedings. “Humanoid” and “Funky Humanoid” muck around with robotic, and thoroughly grooving, themes. But the title of the album’s final tune might be its most autobiographic. That tune, “The Happiest Boy In Town,” serves as an homage to a photo of Charlie Parker smiling. That smile shines throughout this tune and the entire program. Prieto and company bring the joy, just as Dafnis has brought smiles to audiences in this country and around the world since he arrived in the States 25 years ago. Check out the November 2024 issue of DownBeat for more about Dafnis Prieto and his music. DB

Listening to Luther Allison play piano is like watching Simone Biles do floor exercises. He turns effortless, physics-defying technical wizardry into evocative, involving art and never fails to stick the landing. Sure enough, I Owe It All To You — his leader debut, after years supporting trombonist Michael Dease, drummer Ulysses Owens Jr. and vocalist Samara Joy — is a portrait of a straightahead pianist who seems to have no weak points in his arsenal.

Fronting a trio with bassist Boris Kozlov and drummer Zach Adleman, Allison begins by dispatching the twin pillars of the tradition: the hard-driving swinger and the exquisite ballad. The former, the title track, finds the North Carolinian brandishing a percussive thrust and a deep, peculiarly Southern gospel aesthetic. Then the waltzing “Until I See You Again” performs a complete turnabout, with delicate, fine-honed piano phrases that lock in with the subtle pizzicato and brush strokes.

If that wasn’t enough, Allison moves on from these originals to another back-to-back hat trick, contemporary pop and classic standard covers. Stevie Wonder’s “Knocks Me Off My Feet” and Rodgers & Hart’s “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” both afford him opportunities to enmesh the hard and soft sides of his personality. He also swings both tunes with vigor (though differently, adding sweetness to the first and cocksure swagger to the second).

The list of can-dos only grows from there. Creative melodies shaped by ingenious harmonies? Check (Allison’s “The Things We Used To Say”). Improvs with a precise blend of resourcefulness and taste? Check (his solos on Harold Mabern’s “There But For The Grace Of” and Mulgrew Miller’s “New York”). Empathic communication with the band? Check (everything about “Lu’s Blues,” which also shows Allison’s blues chops). A Latin groover is the only missing puzzle piece, but, hey — he’s gotta save something for next time.

The Village Vanguard in New York has always been hallowed ground for Bill Charlap, ever since the pianist was just a kid knocking around Greenwich Village at night and eavesdropping on jazz clubs. So it makes perfect sense that his longstanding trio with bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington would consistently play at the top of their game inside the venerated Greenwich Village venue, which has for years been hosting the trio for an annual two-week residency. Their natural affinity for the club was documented once previously on the trio’s 2007 Blue Note album Live At The Village Vanguard. The group’s latest release, And Then Again, transports the listener back to the Vanguard during a much more recent Saturday evening performance where Charlap and trio find themselves truly in their element and at the epitome of their creative powers. In its 27-year existence, the group has evolved to levels of seamless interaction and extrasensory communication exhibited only in the best of the best ensembles in jazz history. In the group’s discography, a micro-canon of piano-trio language and repertoire, And Then Again hits as especially open and free, seemingly leading away from an outsize book of hundreds of tunes and arrangements and more toward a strategy of inspired intuitiveness. Spontaneous interplay and interpretive flow are the takeaway on this set of exquisitely executed bebop and ballads, which includes jazz standards by Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck and Kenny Barron as well as songbook chestnuts like “All The Things You Are,” “Darn That Dream” and “The Man I Love.” And Then Again is available for pre-order now on limited-edition Blue Note Store exclusive color vinyl, black vinyl, CD and digital download. Charlap and his trio return to the Vanguard for a two-week run Sept. 3–8 and Sept. 10–15 as the pianist’s summer tour dates continue into the fall. Other concerts of note on his schedule include appearances with Dee Dee Bridgewater and Nicholas Payton at the John Coltrane Jazz Festival in High Point, North Carolina, on Sept. 1 and at SFJAZZ in San Francisco on Sept. 28–29; an Oct. 22–26 run with Ron Carter at Birdland in New York; and solo shows at Dizzy’s Club @ Jazz at Lincoln Center Nov. 8–10.

Chaotic Neutral is neither. It is off-kilter and sometimes jarring, but deliberately (and very meticulously) so; the angularity and fraught emotion that guitarist-composer Max Light suffuses it with never goes down easy enough to approach neutrality. What it is, though, is complex, shrouded in mystery and endlessly intriguing.

Much of the album’s off-kilter quality comes via its rhythms. Light descends from the Andrew Hill–Guillermo Klein school of adding or subtracting eighth notes from a stable time signature, putting quite a heavy load on the shoulders of bassist Walter Stinson and drummer Steven Crammer. (Particularly the latter: Simply sketching the outlines of the opening “Pathos,” or comping Caleb Curtis’s stritch solo on “Brown Bear,” become akin to drum solos.) Not that the guitarist lets himself off easy, having to navigate the melodies of “Pathos,” “Brown Bear” and the title track — the latter for which pianist Julian Shore, who doubles Light, also gets props — across glitch-like grooves. Yet that gives him a chance to show off some serious chops even before getting to the improvised gymnastics. “Chaotic Neutral” is essentially a master class in cutting paths through tricky meters.

Which surfaces another adjective for Chaotic Neutral: demanding. These rhythms, and their attendant melodies and harmonies, are often uncomfortable at first. Sometimes the payoff comes in track sequencing: if one makes it through the difficult “Pathos,” the prize is the sinuous sunrise of “Vals Quartzite.” Sometimes the smoother foundations yield tougher tunes, as on the delicate, eerie “Is It True” and “Wash.” But there’s always a foothold of beauty tucked in somewhere, as in Shore’s gorgeous rumination on “Is It True.” And sometimes the jagged stuff is its own reward: Check the witty, Thelonious Monk-like lope of “Brown Bear” for proof.

Contrary to his name, Light doesn’t do light material. But for the listener, heavy lifting comes with heavy recompense.

Yelena Eckemoff has drawn from a tonal palette of deep greens and blues in crafting the 13 compositions for her latest project, Romance Of The Moon, which features Sardinian trumpet player Paolo Fresu as the primary lead voice for her instrumental interpretations of 13 poems by the Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca (1898–1936). The Russian-born pianist, who is so focused on expanding her already wide-ranging body of compositional work that she no longer performs live, has produced at least one new recording every year since she released her breakout concept album Cold Sun in 2010. Long based in North Carolina, she’s known for choosing some of the finest improvisers in Europe and and the U.S. to interpret and record her music. Romance Of The Moon fits her established M.O. to a “T,” with the Rome-based rhythm section of bassist Luca Bulgarelli and drummer Stephano Bagnoli providing hypersensitive support and Italian guitar maestro Riccardo Bertuzzi replacing Fresu on four tracks. The Romance Of The Moon is a gentle, thoughtfully paced collection of aural watercolors that come across as somber, mournful laments spattered with moments of stormy anguish and oozing with soothing doses of whimsical humor. The album cover and booklet art, which Eckemoff painted herself, represent the mood of not just the music within, but also the very poems and text that inspire it. Eckemoff provides her own English-language translation of each poem in the booklet, so you can get right to the heart of the source material and reap more extensive rewards than you’d get by listening alone. The musicians, too, were provided with translations — in Italian — to help them fully absorb the music and its poetic messages. From concept to completion, Romance Of The Moon marks yet another major success for the classically schooled Eckemoff, whose inherently selfless music is only finished “when recorded with jazz musicians,” she says. “I design the project for them to be able to express themselves.”