Jazz
Tzadik · 19 June 2026
“If I Should Lose You” opens the record with the tune laid out almost weightlessly and very slowly, and ends on three repeated chords that leave a hardness nothing in the preceding three minutes and sixteen seconds had prepared. It is the first of nineteen tracks. Nineteen tracks in fifty-five minutes and four seconds means nothing here is allowed to stretch: the average is two minutes fifty-four.
Ran Blake was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on 20 April 1935, and he is ninety-one. He founded the Third Stream department at the New England Conservatory with Gunther Schuller and taught there for more than forty years, and this album’s programme is his working method set out as a list: Puccini’s “My Name is Mimi”, Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’”, Ray Charles’s “Hallelujah, I Love Her So”, Al Green’s “Judy”, “Silent Night”, “La Vie en Rose” and, to finish, “The Thrill Is Gone” by Roy Hawkins and Rick Darnell.
“You Are My Sunshine” is where you hear most clearly what he does to a song. It arrives with the harmony bent out of true, and what was a postcard tune turns uneasy without the melody having moved an inch. On “Saving All My Love for You”, by Michael Masser and Gerry Goffin, the procedure reverses: the tune stays out front and everything underneath it shifts. Blake had already recorded that one this year with Dominique Eade on “Roots & Byways” (Sunnyside) and remakes it alone here; a composition of Eade’s, “Go Gently to the Water” (2:29), is on the record too.
Twelve of the nineteen tracks come in under three minutes and only two run past four. Blake’s method is to take a tune apart and come back to it, and on “Ain’t Misbehavin’” (1:42), “La Vie en Rose” (1:57) or “The Bebopper” (1:54) the piece shuts before the re-reading has got beyond being proposed. The record is calmer, too, than the Blake of thirty years ago, with fewer sudden detours, which used to make him recognisable within a bar or two.
Tzadik, 19 June 2026. Nineteen tracks, 55:04, solo piano.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents