David Chesky - Trio in the New Harmonic: Aural Paintings (2018)

While conceived as a series of tonal paintings, somehow David Chesky's cornucopia of oblique ruminations on Trio In The New Harmonic suggest to this scribe something more declamatory, and poetically austere, like some non-denominational evening service at a distant Northern latitude and longitude, bathed in a wintery glow, with the faint promise of spring colors peeking through the firmament-illuminating a largely black and white canvas with pastel intimations of some elusive wakening. Chesky's is a chamber music chrysalis seeking to be reborn as a post-modern jazz trio in the left wing traditions of those American pianists, who while they were surely informed by the harmonic cycles of Tin Pan Alley song forms, and a blues/ragtime/swing based tradition of the piano in it's virtuoso approximation of post-bop orchestral power, were not beholden to it; seeking instead to depict a more abstract canvas, a painterly sense of the piano's potential for said chamber music sensibility in which, while there is considerable heat applied to the collective improvisational pot, things are consciously never quite fired up to a full boil.