Steve Lantner - What You Can Throw

hatOLOGY 641

The meaning attached to hatOLOGY album covers can sometimes be a mystery, but the hourglass slab of eroded desert rock pictured here is a pithy analogy for pianist Steve Lantner’s music. Naturalistic in design and deployment, a lot of time and trouble goes in to its creation and it has a tendency of creeping up on the unsuspecting listener. The overall effect is like a time-lapse film reel with countless hours of preparation and practice condensed into a fraction of the temporal space. Lantner enlists the same crew as on his 2005 Skycap release Blue Yonder. Comparison of the two records reveal a continuing maturation in the latest one. Good as the earlier effort was and is, intervening years have allowed the trio to truly gel.

Four out of the disc’s five tracks stretch past ten-minutes, but none of them feels over-long. The extended durations allow for close scrutiny of each of the players solo abilities and all rise ably to the challenge. Case in point, Joe Morris has really come into his own as a bassist. His handling of the bull fiddle is almost antipodal to his more celebrated work on frets with phrasing often slowed down and carefully parceled out. Atention to articulation and tone is similarly focused, the weighty snap of his strings echoing older workhorses like Wilbur Ware rather than the fleet-fingered filigree of some of his peers. He pens the opener “New Routine”, a piece possessive of the perfect oxymoronic title, one that also reflects the stoop-shouldered bass shuffle at its core. Drummer Luther Gray conveys a near ideal union of propulsion and finesse. A lithe and attentive touch combined with an equal-opportunity opinion toward brushes reveals kinship with Paul Motian and the two have a comparably idiosyncratic approach toward beat construction.

Lantner’s lines communicate a fascinating chronology, roping in and refracting the bop stylings of Powell and Clark but also echoing early Cecil in terms of rhythmic transience and staccato repetition. These traits bring to mind Connie Crothers, not so much in overt approach, but in the way he internalizes whole branches of the jazz piano family tree and grinds them into his own highly personalized pulp. The two covers, Braxton’s “23J” and Ornette’s “Broken Shadows”, reveal his roots in more recent developments. Both renderings sustain the spirit of the originals while also catering fully to the new context. Even when the trio traffics in turbulent interplay as with the roiling collisions of the title piece, underlying structure and symmetry pervades. It’s long been fashionable to favorably describe piano trio discs as breaking the stolid mold that’s been in place at least since Bill Evans had his epochal Vanguard stand. Lantner doesn’t so much break the mold as recognize its malleable possibilities and shape it with his own catalytic perspective. It’s an important lesson, again resonant in that geological cover shot: new need not come at the complete eradication of the old.

~ Derek Taylor