NEW RELEASES : Joyous Signs of Good Things to Come

STEPHEN SCOTT

“Aminah’s Dream”

Verve

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At the still-youthful age of 23, pianist-composer Scott is beginning to make a convincing case for himself as one of the likely jazz MVPs of the ‘90s.

Working here with the world-class rhythm team of Elvin Jones and Ron Carter, Scott plays every note with a buoyant sense of joy and enthusiasm. A working familiarity with his pianistic predecessors constantly bubbles to the surface, with angular Monkish lines on “Young Confucius,” a blending of Horace Silver’s blues-based improvising with stride piano rhythms on “The Pit and the Pendulum” and touches of Wynton Kelly, Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner almost everywhere. When these valuable sources become more thoroughly integrated into Scott’s own impressive imagination, he will be very special, indeed.

At this stage of his career, Scott’s arranging and composing skills are not quite up to the level of his free-flying improvisations and reveal a trifle too much fascination with the orchestrations of the Miles Davis Birth of the Cool ensembles. But the potential for uniqueness is there, nonetheless, and strongly evident in such elements as his use of an offbeat rhythmic meter on the title track, the carefully textured horn timbres of “Positive Images (Mother, Father)” and “When God Created Woman” and the dramatic contrasts of “Moontrane.”

New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).