Luciano Troja Revisits the Understatedly Gorgeous Piano Music of Earl Zindars

In 2010, Italian pianist Luciano Troja made an important contribution to the jazz canon with his album At Home with Zindars, a rare exploration of the music of Earl Zindars, from who Bill Evans drew for some of his more memorable material. Thirteen years later, Troja is back with an even more auspicious recording of even rarer numbers by the undeservedly obscure composer and pianist, whose connection to Evans makes sense in terms of sheer tunefulness. Troja recorded the first half solo, live in concert in 2018 at the Maybeck Recital Hall in Berkeley and finished the record a year later with a suite of his own in the studio in Italy. And the album, To New Life, is finally here for you to enjoy (you can hear parts at Bandcamp for the time being).

What’s most stunning here is how much of a Mompou-esque, eerie upper-register gleam there is in this music, often juxtaposed with moments of unselfconsciously rapt beauty, which Troja parses with care and a steady understatement. Zindars’ heritage was Armenian, and that influence comes through strongly here.

The opening track, Lullaby for Helene is a gorgeously otherworldly waltz, Troja slowly and elegantly moving from Messiaenic glimmer to a fond neoromantic ballad and back. The second number is a mashup of sorts, the ragtime-tinged Sareen Jurer into Zindars’ wife Annig’s Hokees Orrant Ee Var with its stark Armenian tinges.

Troja takes a matter-of-fact, unhurried approach to the subtly fugal tidal shifts in Dreams Are These, which perfectly capsulizes this music’s appeal. Likewise, Elsa, a waltz with some deliciously glistening, romping cadences, which could be retitled “My Favorite Uneasy Things.”

Troja makes a diptych out of Thoughts of Mine, an increasingly troubled, chromatically-fueled 1992 theme composition, and a restrained take of Mother of Earl, the swinging 1957 tune popularized by Evans.

Troja goes back to steady waltz time for Karen’s Mode with its interweave of attractive singalong balladry and thorny chromatics, with an unexpectedly scrambling midsection. Roses for Annig is kaleidoscopic, from wistful to joyously Chopinesque. The last of the concert tracks is the world premiere recording of Wissahickon Walk, a Pennsylvania tableau which Troja begins sparely and gingerly before expanding from wary rainy-day echo figures to a mysterious interlude which also features muted riq frame drum and then a rather stern, martially-tinged segment.

Troja winds up the record with his title suite, his own partita, inspired by a Zindars poem. The introduction, Rain makes an aptly picturesque segue with the Zindars material, followed by Silenced World, a return to solemn, enigmatic bell-like sonics. Part three, titled Wait has a plaintive Angelo Badalementi-esque minimalism, while the conclusion is guardedly celebratory. What an absolutely gorgeous album.

Pianist Luciano Troja Rediscovers an Important Jazz Composer

This is the kind of album we love best: a rediscovery, a new appreciation of someone who may have slipped under the radar. Sicilian pianist Luciano Troja learned of Earl Zindars (1927-2005) through Bill Evans, who popularized Zindars’ best-known composition, How My Heart Sings, as well as recording and playing many of the Chicago-based composer’s works throughout his career. Troja credits Zindars with being one of the pioneers of using multiple time signatures (in this case, 3/4 and 4/4) in the same piece, something of an overstatement: jazz groups were doing it decades before Dave Brubeck popularized the device. But Zindars has been long overdue for a rediscovery: he was third stream before the term existed. Like Brubeck, he blended impressionistic, sometimes brooding Romantic themes with jazz, utilizing strikingly imagistic melodies that sometimes took on a cinematic sweep. Also recognized within the classical world, his works for orchestra and brass were frequently performed during his lifetime. Troja’s new cd At Home with Zindars isn’t the first Zindars album – pianist Bill Cunliffe did one in 2003 with a sextet, and Zindars himself produced a couple for pianist Don Haas and his trio – but it’s probably the best (Zindars rarely recorded professionally, and it doesn’t appear that he ever released an album of his own). Troja plays solo, with an understatedly cantabile glimmer closely attuned to the nuance and warm emotional immediacy of Zindars’ music. It’s an album of subtleties: as a plus, many of the compositions here have never been previously released.

Many of these songs – and they are songs in the purest sense of the word – are miniatures, possibly designed to offer a comfortable melodic framework for extended improvisation. The casually swinging, Romantically tinged ballad Mother of Earl that opens the album sets the tone for most of the rest of what’s here. The simply titled Nice Place grows majestically out of a memorably Chopinesque architecture; Silverado Trail builds from minimalistic echoes of Debussy to a vivid blue-sky theme. The memorably moody, modally-tinged My Love Is an April Song is the darkest and most overtly jazz-oriented of all the tracks here, followed closely by the wary, apprehensive vignette I Always Think of You. Several others lean in the opposite direction toward pop, most successfully on the blues-infused Four Times Round, which wouldn’t be out of place in the Harold Arlen catalog. Troja’s version of How My Heart Sings gets a rubato treatment that reaches more avidly for the emotional brass ring here than anything else here; Troja’s lone composition here, Earl and Bill so perfectly captures Zindars’ trademark classical/blues blend that it could be Zindars himself. The album closes with its strongest and most intense track, Roses for Annig, which Zindars wrote for his wife shortly before his death. A couple of tracks here lean toward Windham Hill blandness and could have been left out, but all in all, this is an important achievement and a treat for fans of the genial, evocative style that Zindars – and Troja – so successfully mine. The album comes with a very informative, illustrated 44-page booklet in both English and Italian.