Pianist Carney Demonstrates Probing Musical Imagination

With new jazz pianists bursting out in all directions, many of them emerging from the same pool of Oscar Peterson inspiration, it’s a pleasure to hear a player whose music flows from his own creative wellspring.

The performance by the James Carney Trio at Rocco Ristorante on Thursday night, in fact, was a consistently compelling example of a probing imagination at work. Working in a remarkably symbiotic interaction with bassist Todd Sickafoose and drummer Dan Morris, Carney took the risk of offering a program of all original music.

It’s the rare jazz performer who can sustain a set that lacks at least one or two familiar themes. But Carney kept a moderate-size audience in his musical thrall for the full span of an hour-and-a-half collection of material.

The music’s appeal traced largely to its shape-shifting qualities. On some numbers, the rhythm ebbed and flowed with tide-like surges; on others, it drove forward with an urgency filled with jazz funk implications. Unusual meters occasionally surfaced, but their off-center accents were so ingrained in the musical content that they never demanded attention solely on the basis of their singularity.

Carney’s composed and improvised passages were similarly diverse, in source and execution. A few were free expositions, others roved above passionately repeated ostinato figures from Sickafoose, and still others circled through scale- and mode-based melodies.

All of this was executed in association with intricate trio interplay, some of it composed, some of it simply the expression of what can result when three young musical minds embark on a joint exploration of new territory.

It’s not surprising that Carney was the recipient of the $10,000 first-place award in the seventh annual Thelonious Monk International Composers Competition last September. What is surprising is the fact that this obviously unique talent has not yet been signed to a record contract, and that he thus far has had to release his first two albums on his own personal label.