Solo

Listening to Misha Mengelberg play solo piano is like eavesdropping on a highly subversive mind at work. Everything is laid bare. Unlike Keith Jarrett, who endeavors to find a flow in solo-improvising, Mengelberg sets up expectations, then delights in sabotaging them. What starts out as a jaunty folk song of the sort one finds in a child’s piano method book, “Koekoek” suddenly sprouts “wrong” notes, then collapses into crunching thumps. “Bill Evans in Dán begins, appropriately, with an oceanic pull but devolves into scary fits of isolation. Difficult, knotty, contradictory, and disjunctive, Mengelberg is suspicious of any sort of music making that creates or sustains illusions. Like an abstract painter, he wants you to see that a line is a line, not a figure or a face. Yet there is a passion — and playfulness — running beneath this often atonal and dissonant astringency that, if given the chance, inexorably draws the careful listener in. Technically, Mengelberg’s blunt attack and clanging tone, as well as his teetering rhythmic hesistations, are inspired by Thelonious Monk. Yet he also has developed a lightly skittering, oblique keyboard approach all his own, one that suggests subconscious trains of thought rising to the surface or knocking on the side doors. Solo is one of Mengelberg’s finest albums, and a grand introduction to one of the cleverest minds in jazz. – Paul De Barros