Jazz
JeruJazz Records · 4 September 2026
The model is stated on the label’s own page: “Undercurrent”, the record Bill Evans and Jim Hall made in 1962. The title adds the Italian painting term for strong contrast between light and dark, and Kevin Fort and Andy Brown apply it to the distance between a piano and a guitar: percussive attack against warm sustain, harmonic density against line.
Eight tracks, forty-seven minutes and forty-four seconds, split evenly between four Fort originals and four standards. It opens with Irving Berlin’s “How Deep Is the Ocean” (five thirty-eight) and closes with Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” (six fourteen); in between sit Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite”, the shortest thing here at four seventeen, and “For Heaven’s Sake”. It was cut at Transient Sound, and Vijay Tellis-Nayak takes the engineering, the mixing and the mastering credits.
Hrayr Attarian, writing in All About Jazz, settles on “Leroy”: it starts with the head in unison, Brown comes out of it with resonant phrases and Fort takes the thing apart and puts it back together. He picks out the waltz feel of “Morning Light”, and in the title track the pianist’s block chords and sparse notes. This is Fort’s fourth album as a leader in four years (“Perspectives” in 2022, “Twilight” in 2023 and “Everything I Love” in January 2025) and his first as a duo.
The running times say something else. A record that presents itself as an exercise in contrast spreads its eight tracks between four seventeen and a flat seven minutes, and six of the eight fall inside a forty-second band, between five thirty-eight and six seventeen. The contrast is there inside each piece; across the sequence it isn’t. Seven minutes of blues and six of a ballad take up practically the same room, which leaves a beautifully played recital that never decides where it wants to raise its voice.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents