Thoughtful, Lyrical Songs Without Words From Pianist Lara Driscoll

Pianist Lara Driscoll isn’t out to blow people away with explosive chops, or perplex listeners with gnomic, too-cool-for-school harmonizations for all the the jazz bean-counters. Instead, she takes a painterly approach to her music. Bill Evans is an obvious comparison, but Fred Hersch‘s mature work is a better one. Her vivid new album Woven Dreams is streaming at Bandcamp.

She and her trio ease their way into the album with a cautiously exploratory, rather wary take of Autumn in New York, skirting the melody as bassist Paul Rushka and drummer Dave Laing supply a lithe, gentle bounce, through an outro full of disquiet. There’s relief in this particular fall, but there’s also peril: this is New York, after all.

Terse high-low contrasts and lyricism ripple over a similarly supple, tropical groove in Siblings, with a smart, tightly clustering drum solo for a coda. Airport Limbo begins with an expected tension, hits a genial bossa-tinted swing and returns to a Monkish intensity: looks like this plane made it off the runway after all.

Forgiving – Black Dog Skirts Away, a triptych, begins with a brooding, troubled tableau, Laing rumbling underneath unti Driscoll finally introduces some closure. The centerpiece shifts from a moody, Ellingtonian, darkly blues-infused sway to a reflectively contented shuffle. A fleeting conclusion reminds that these memories still haunt.

O Morro Nao Tern Vez (Favela) gets a precise interpretation in the same vein as the album’s first track. Driscoll builds an even more pensive atmosphere in Mamy Adieu, a wistful, elegantly elegaic piece, shifting in and out of waltz time. Bass and drums figure more playfully in the jaunty interweave of Trespassers.

Driscoll’s spacious, regal understatement in her solo version of Ellington’s Isfahan is breathtaking: she really likes those flickering upper-register flourishes that Marc Cary uses a lot. Then she and the band make a motoring rumba out of Just One of Those Things before swinging it briskly.

After a moody intro, Driscoll brings disquieitng Monk echoes out in ECMT: with its balletesque, allusively chromatic bass solo, it could be the album’s darkest number. She closes with the title track and its expansive, wee-hours feel, a pervasive restlessness beneath all the lustre. You will be seeing this album on a lot of best-of lists at the end of the year.

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