Aaron Parks | News | INFOTEXT: Aaron Parks - By All Means

 

1. A Way 6:09

2. Parks Lope 5:09

3. For María José 4:66

4. Dense Phantasy 6:23

5. Anywhere Together 5:33

6. Little River 6:52

7. Raincoat 6:27

 

All tracks composed by Aaron Parks

Piano: Aaron Parks / Tenor Saxophone: Ben Solomon / Bass: Ben Street / Drums: Billy Hart

Produced by Aaron Parks & Ben Street

 

Pianist und Komponist Aaron Parks erweitert sein Trio mit Bassist Ben Street und Schlagzeuger Billy Hart durch den Tenorsaxofonisten Ben Solomon zu einem Quartett, um auf seinem brillanten dritten Blue Note-Album „By All Means!!“ neue Klangpaletten für seine Musik zu erkunden.

Bereits 2008 stellte Parks sich mit seinem bei Blue Note erschienenen Debütalbum „Invisible Cinema“ als spannende neue Stimme im Jazz vor. Er überzeugte von Beginn an nicht nur an den Tasten, sondern auch als Komponist ebenso komplexer wie eingängiger Melodien. Nach zwei Alben als Frontman beim Label ECM („Arborescence“, 2013 & „Find The Way“, 2017) veröffentlichte er u.a. drei Alben mit seiner Band Little Big. Mit dem dritten davon, “Little Big III”, co-produziert von Blue-Note-Chef Don Was, kehrte er 2024 zu Blue Note Records zurück.

Obwohl Aaron Parks in den letzten Jahren seine Band Little Big zum Mittelpunkt seines Schaffens gemacht hat, hörte er nie auf, Musik zu schreiben, die einem anderen harmonischen Universum angehört, beeinflusst von Künstlern wie Wayne Shorter, Kenny Wheeler, Horace Silver, Duke Ellington, Joe Henderson, Kurt Rosenwinkel und anderen. „By All Means!!“ präsentiert sieben neue Eigenkompositionen, darunter ergreifende Widmungen an seine Frau und seinen Sohn, und knüpft nicht nur mit seiner Cover-Optik an die Ästhetik klassischer Blue-Note-Alben an.

 

 

Over the past two decades, pianist and composer Aaron Parks has earned a reputation for pushing jazz’s aesthetic boundaries, applying his jazz training to music that boldly defies genre lines. On an album like 2024’s Little Big III, for example, Parks led his band Little Big through electric music that blended jazz’s cutting edge with Radiohead, blues, electronica, krautrock and more.

Sometimes, in the midst of so much brilliant synthesis, it might seem easy to forget that Parks is still first and foremost a working jazz musician — a performer who adores a durable tune, a deeply swinging rhythm section and a great horn foil, and who feels most at peace in a dimly lit basement nightclub. His new Blue Note album, By All Means, is a gorgeous reminder of his lifelong devotion to swinging music, as well as an homage to a group he feels honored to share the bandstand with. It features one of today’s most soulfully connected rhythm sections, bassist Ben Street and drummer Billy Hart, along with a newcomer, the tenor saxophonist Ben Solomon.

Still, for all their wonderful evocations of 20th-century jazz, the seven original compositions that make up By All Means are unmistakably the work of Aaron Parks. “I don’t conceive of this as being so utterly distinct from past projects,” he says. “It’s another book of songs that felt like they were calling for their own context, for a certain group of musicians to bring them to life.” 

“This is a record that loves the jazz tradition, the tradition of Black American Music,” he adds. “It’s not about nostalgia or preservation. It’s about being alive within that lineage, that continuum. That’s what the title points to — it’s a big yes, a way of saying ‘absolutely, let’s join that party.’”

But what exactly does that entail? To start, it involves Parks’ gift for writing melodies that sparkle with warmth and poignancy, supported by infrastructure of rich imagination — harmony and song forms that urge the improvisers onward while keeping the players and listeners alike guessing as to what comes next. Then there’s the indefinable hookup between Street and Hart — a long-honed brand of swinging that is somehow equally raw and refined. Elegant on its surface, it harbors a delightful, visceral friction at its core, a quietly explosive push and pull that thankfully never settles. If the best modern acoustic jazz is all about striving toward an impeccable balance between the comforts of jazz history and the valor of genuine adventure, then By All Means rests on the equator.

Although the album — co-produced by Parks and Street — came together quickly following a fiery run at the Village Vanguard, its roots reach back decades. The story begins in the early 2000s, when the pianist and bassist first met, not long after Parks had moved to New York from the Seattle area. For several years they lived in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, and they spent a lot of time together. “Ben became a really important older-brother figure for me. He showed me so much music — and he told me sometimes uncomfortable truths during a time when a lot of people were elevating me as a hotshot ‘new guy’ on the scene,” says Parks. To this day, Street remains an invaluable source of perspective and cohesion, on and offstage. As a co-producer he brings sonic expertise to the studio and “a tremendously discerning ear,” as Parks says. “Ben’s a very special musician, one of the great bassists of our time. There’s inquisitiveness and integrity in everything he does.”

Club-hopping around New York as a listener in the aughts, Parks took a keen interest in the Billy Hart Quartet, featuring Street, saxophonist Mark Turner and pianist Ethan Iverson. “I would go and sit as close to the drums as possible,” Parks remembers. “I was especially fixated on the hookup between Ben and Billy. And it was Ben who encouraged me to call Billy to do gigs.

That initiated one of the most meaningful relationships of Parks’ musical life — and gave the young pianist the chance to experience swing straight from the source, sharpened throughout sessions with jazz icons in the 1960s and ‘70s. At first, Hart’s rhythmic sense, with its constant simmer of micro-adjustments, could be bewildering. “It’s incredibly nuanced and also incredibly severe at times,” says Parks, explaining how different it felt from the music-school exactitude he’d become familiar with when playing with his millennial peers. But Parks soon became enamored of both the technique and the man. “I just love Billy so much,” he says. “His playing calls you to full attention, invites you to show up all the way. It’s so emotional, funky, alive. And he’s a true master yet also remains endlessly curious — that’s something to aspire to.”

Parks, Street and Hart first came together on record for 2017’s Find the Way, which subsumed their chemistry into the well-defined aesthetic of the ECM label. When a new opportunity emerged with Blue Note, Parks decided to reorient the lineup so that this great piano trio could become a great rhythm section and enjoy the art of supporting a soloist. Or, as Parks says with a laugh, “I just wanted to comp. And I knew the special way that Billy played with horn players.”

For that role, Parks tapped Ben Solomon, a rising saxophonist who broke through as a member of trumpeter Wallace Roney’s band. In Solomon, Parks heard a bold, bright tone; a thoughtful, personal voice; and a straighter, more direct approach that gave the pianist a license to venture further in his own solos. He was also struck by the saxophonist’s dedication and “depth of study.” Parks identified Solomon’s deep devotion to the music of John Coltrane, but also noted that he “was inhabiting the logic of that world itself — not just playing licks or running patterns, but understanding it from the inside out.”

You might say the same of Parks’ writing here, which passes various jazz (and jazz-adjacent) languages through his singular prism. He describes “A Way” as a sort of obliquely Ellingtonian space ballad. The staggering, formally askew “Parks Lope” takes cues from Herbie Nichols and Monk, as well as Parks' former employer Kurt Rosenwinkel. Parks wrote “Anywhere Together” in his mid-teens, under the sway of boundary-pushing post-bop — think Kenny Wheeler’s Gnu High LP and Wayne Shorter’s ’60s writing. The title of the pensive ballad “Dense Phantasy” is an anagram of Dayna Stephens, the saxophone master and a frequent Parks collaborator. “Raincoat” is a gorgeous closer inspired by the electronic musician Baths.

But By All Means is no mere exercise in pastiche, and the album also contains some of the most moving writing of Parks’ career. “For María José” is a dedication to Parks’ wife. “It’s my attempt to write something worthy of her,” he says. “Little River” is a lullaby for the couple’s oldest son, a musical expression of joyousness underscored by Hart’s magnificent drum performance. “I could listen to that drumbeat from the outro on loop, all day,” Parks says.

In fact, all of Parks’ new album is a kind of heartfelt thank-you note: to his influences, his family, his bandmates — and to jazz itself. “More than anything it’s about the joys of playing together, improvising with one another over a song form,” Parks says. “This record is simply about loving the music.”

 

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