“Dial 411,” the opening track from pianist, producer, and composer Craig Hartley’s Books on Tape, Vol. 1, starts with two skips — ready, set — from the piano, drums, and bass, and then go: the piano is off like a shot, the rabbit in the track, the bass and drums two greyhounds neck and neck in hot pursuit. The trio — Hartley, Carlo De Rosa on bass, and Henry Cole on drums — explodes with musical ideas, converging for a split second at the end of the form, a muscular descending line that feels less like a hook than a curve in the racetrack. You’d think it was a sprint, at the pace they’re going, except that they keep that pace for five minutes.
The album, released in 2013, feels like an introduction to the world for New Haven-based jazz pianist Craig Hartley, and what an introduction it would be. Except that Hartley and the world, even then, had already been properly introduced. Hartley may call New Haven home base, but for years his performance and recording schedule has taken him from around here to New York to Italy to Japan.
This Saturday at 8 p.m., however, Hartley will be performing right here in New Haven at Yale’s Saybrook College, as part of the Jazz Haven’s Jazz at the Underbrook Concert Series. The show is free and open to the public. A jam session will follow, to which musicians of all skill levels are encouraged to bring their instruments and play — with a musician like Hartley, a rare treat.
The concert also celebrates the release of Books on Tape, Vol. II, which finds Hartley’s mind, after years of playing, still racing, this time using his improvisation and composition chops to create next-level mashups, honoring the spirits of the musical giants who have come before him and adding his own distinct voice.
“Sinclair (Prelude no. 2 in C Minor + Solar)” has Hartley starting solo with Bach’s famous prelude. Before long, however, he is improvising off of it — its melodic ideas, its harmonic structure — and in time, manages to work the music into Miles Davis’s “Solar,” and then brings the entire piece full circle again.
He makes similar musical moves on “Imagine Peace Piece,” creating a soundscape in which John Lennon and Bill Evans can shake hands. The effect, for this listener, is to appreciate the connections between music too often considered disparate. You can hear, all over again, the improvisatory playfulness inherent in Bach’s mathematical compositions, and the structure rigor that grounds the freedom Davis made for himself. You can hear that maybe “Imagine” isn’t as simple a song as the collective imagination has made it out to be, while Bill Evans’s music is rendered that much more accessible. Hartley widens your ears, but also opens the door wide, to let everyone in.
Bring your horn.
Craig Hartley plays Oct. 8, 8 p.m. at Saybrook College, 242 Elm St. The show is free and open to the public. Open jam session follows the performance.
Having returned from a nocturnal Sunday installation in Racine Wisconsin's Plateau Artspace, our crew decided to rev up Hartley''s Imagine Peace Piece, the feature track of this review. Rather listen to Tuvan throat singers performing at the Wisconsin School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, as we did last year, than have another free form improvisatory rendering from the audibly uninspired. At least the Tuvans knew a rare tune by Green Day.
Imagine our yowling shock at the once-sonorous introduction being elevated through the sumptuous swell of medical-tape-thwapping bass strings while Hartley's percussion complement meandered amidst the runes of John Wooden's Drummer's Rudimental Reference Book to create a passionate mise en scène followed by a much-anticipated regression to the mean: to Peace.
After more Pernod and cat-play, my clowder ejected dejectedly and doo-dahed their way down the alley while I anxiously gobbled a chunk of first sample track to discover what Solar really means. Ineluctable modality of the audible.
Great stuff.