A champion of contemporary music and a fixture on the Southern California scene for decades, pianist Gloria Cheng is expanding her horizons further with an enterprising new release, Root Progressions (Biophilia Records).
Cheng commissioned six jazz-rooted composers to write pieces for her in contemporary classical idioms, wanting to see what would come out of their cross-pollinating imaginations. Though she’s not a jazzer herself, her history — she was the go-to pianist of the exacting Pierre Boulez whenever he visited Los Angeles — should tell you all you need to know about her tremendous technical chops and ability to absorb whatever a composer can throw at her. These skills are all on display here, beautifully recorded.
Of the six composers, Anthony Davis brings the most audible strands of jazz to the project with his piece Piano Heaven, a three-movement suite that pays homage to three departed jazz keyboard greats. “Spheroid,” dedicated to Thelonious Monk (Sphere was his middle name), starts out rigorously, stabbing away in a Monk-like manner before relaxing into an easygoing swinging reminiscence. “Turquoise” is an affectionate tribute to Duke Ellington, with strains of the blues and some downward runs in the style of Art Tatum wafting by. “Shards For C.T.” (short for Cecil Taylor) is naturally full of jagged dissonant edges yet concludes in a gentler and more contemplative mood, like an elegy.
Next on the album is Jon Jang’s delightful Ancestors & Sisters, which is very much based on the pentatonic scale, with fast arpeggios in contrary motion purposely imitating the guzheng (a Chinese zither) and tremolos standing in for the yangqin (a Chinese hammered dulcimer). The center of the piece is a catchy jazz vamp — a recurring riff of fifths and stacked fourths in the left hand (a la McCoy Tyner) that pushes the rhythm forward as the right hand elaborates.
The further Root Progressions goes, the further away it seems to get from jazz’s influence. Arturo O’Farrill’s Mis Guerreros (the mystic secret), designed as an incantation to four Yoruba guardian deities, sounds like a fragmentation of Latin music into Western abstraction. Then in “Shift,” the second of Gernot Wolfgang’s Two Movements, there is a groove, but it’s altered by frequent meter changes, often from measure to measure. Meanwhile, the first movement, “Pendulum,” consists of several brief flurries that descend into held notes followed by silence.
James Newton’s expansive Eight Calla Lilies suggests the impressionism of Claude Debussy, and I also hear the bird calls of Olivier Messiaen — but not the score’s instructions to sound “like Ellington” or “like Bud Powell.” Linda May Han Oh’s ocean-bound Littoral Tales goes from “High Tide,” which opens with jagged intervals gradually subsiding and become sparer and softer, to “Low Tide,” which begins mysteriously, builds up to huge octaves, and settles into a repetitive vamp in the left hand before dissolving into a calm coda.
As for packaging, Root Progressions comes in a bizarre Biopholio format — an innocent-looking square that folds out into a multipaneled paper sculpture with cover art, program notes, track listings, and photos. There is no CD, just QR and letter codes for downloads — all of this with the intention of being more environmentally friendly.
