Cooper-Moore

Solo - Deep in the neighborhood of history and influence

Label: Hopscotch Records Country: USA

"Serious props to Susie Ibarra and Assif Tashar for issuing this live and in-your-face recording of Cooper Moore live at The Pizza Joint in Guelph, Canada.

After a brave introduction by Vijay Iyer (Pico's brother?) with Moore constantly interrupting, Cooper Moore, one third of the the Susie Ibarra Trio, gives his own beat-rant thank you to all of the jazz masters who preceded him. Once this is out of the way, Moore goes after the piano with his hyper-intuitive approach to extended harmonies and timbres.

His esthetics include a highly evolved sense of how improvisation is an extension of the human breath, much more elementary than voice. But it's not only his outer-edge playing that's mind-altering, it's his blues and swing, too. On his "Blues for Jaki Byard," Moore displays his inherent knowledge of boogie-woogie nuances and a keen sense of rhythm shifting that plays behind as well as in front of the beat with the left hand. "Waltz" feels as if Lester Young and Count Basie could have written and performed this if they would have been Turks in the vanguard. On Susie Ibarra's "Radiance," Moore shows the depths of his lyrical commitment by using space and timbre to reflect Ibarra's haunting chromaticism. And on his own "Evolution," he pulls out all the stops with a furious series of minor-key harmonic revelations with a lightning legato phrasing technique and a percussive rain of contrapuntal arpeggios.

Moore dazzles the crowd and the listener with his pervasive "improvisation as lifeblood" approach to performance. Astonishing. "-Thom Jurek