Sacha Perry - Eretik

Smalls 0009

Pianist Sacha Perry received some exposure on Made in New York, an earlier Smalls release by the quintet Across 7 Street; Eretik, a trio date with bassist Ari Roland and drummer Phil Stewart, is his first release under his own name. As with Made in New York the disc has a curious old-but-new feeling, as if it issued from an alternate world where 1950s hard bop stayed strange and “underground” rather than entering the jazz mainstream. Perry is young, but he plays real bebop – dark, dissonant, weird and whimsical, anything but the sleek codification of it that passes for bebop piano nowadays. He’s also a remarkable composer, closest in spirit to Herbie Nichols in his taste for a sort of dark jauntiness, his ability to give a seemingly ordinary phrase a sharp but completely appropriate last-minute harmonic twist, and his ability to pack a world of storytelling into a head. Sometimes Perry literally seems to be speaking to the listener: it’s hard not to hear the “heigh-ho” shrug in “Another Day,” or the murmured farewell in “Goodnight, Goodnight.”

The close-packed density of the heads contrasts sharply with the single-note loopdeloops of Perry’s solos. His lines are extremely long and unbroken, crawling over the keyboard like ivy, and he favours sprightly, slightly jerky swing eighths even on uptempo pieces where most pianists would shift to straight eighths. Such an approach would be awkward if it weren’t for Perry’s sheer poise: he pulls it off without misfingering even on the furious “Whirligig.” At times he overuses stock gestures in order to join up ideas: there are in fact two or three pet patterns that turn up in virtually every phrase. But at its best (“Let’s Get With It,” for instance) this is music in the grand tradition of unstaunchable bebop line-spinning, a worthy heir to Bud Powell, Elmo Hope and Perry’s mentor Barry Harris.