Peter Madsen - Prevue of Tomorrow

Playscape 061705

Peter Madsen’s preferences in pianists are impossible to cavil. Witness the pantheon of masters referenced for his new solo recording celebrating his 50th birthday: Waldron, Hill, Nichols, Taylor, Ra, Weston and Twardzik. Somewhat counter-intuitively-titled, at least a surface glance, Prevue of Tomorrow gathers single selections from the songbooks of those named along with choice compositions by Hasaan Ibn Ali, Muhal Richard Abrams and Lennie Tristano. The disc’s title, incidentally, borrows from a Ra suite of the same name, which is also the source of Madsen’s chosen representative from the Saturnian’s oeuvre “Portrait of the Living Sky.”

Madsen outfits each of the ten pieces with an array of personal touches, but is careful to convey indelible aspects of each composer in his renderings. Waldron’s “Boo” occupies space under a dark cerulean cloud in its stern, pedal-dampened progressions that avoid overt melody. Hill’s “Subterfuge” sustains an overarching rhapsodic lyricism through somber, swirling interlocking chords that achieve superlative architectural symmetry. The colliding time signatures of Ali’s “Three-four vs. Six-Eight Four-Four Ways” test Madsen’s meddle with meter, aligning and diverging along irregular improvisatory tracts that likely would have made the composer clap his hands in delight. Similarly, his take on Twardzik’s “The Girl from Greenland” would probably leave the bop martyr marveling at the liberties taken. For Abrams “Bird Song” Madsen manipulates his instrument’s strings directly, plucking out zither-like sonorities that switch from delicate to bristly and back. The reading of “The Third World” revels in a lively Nicholsian approach to rhythm and melody, Madsen’s fingers once again voicing robust chords that dance and cavort with a dexterity that belies their complexity.

As exciting as these cuts are it’s the versions of Taylor’s “Rick Kick Shaw” and Weston’s “Blues for Africa” that rank as the knockouts to my ears. Madsen treats the first as a grand danse macabre his right hand shaping dizzying, precipitous runs closely tailed by a domineering left. At a mere five minutes there’s an stunning amount of energy and density parceled into the performance, so much that the liner note hyperbole about the studio engineer ducking for cover under his console doesn’t seem that far-fetched. The second piece is more measured and duplicitous, mixing moments of grim severity with detours into jovial stride syncopation. Madsen wisely reels the dissonance in for the home stretch starting with the aforementioned Ra piece with its pastels-shaded motif and haunting sense of cosmic mystery. The recital concludes with Tristano’s “Leave Me,” a piece that has been part of Madsen’s repertoire since the pianist’s collaborations with Warne Marsh in the 1980s. Solo repertory piano projects are not exactly rare endeavors these days, but Madsen’s concerted stab at the form yields something special, a case of old bottles housing new, intensely intoxicating wine if ever there was one.

~ Derek Taylor