Though he left the country more than 20 years ago, returning
home to his native Ukraine is always a special occasion for pianist/composer
Vadim Neselovskyi. His summer 2014 performance at the country's largest jazz
festival, Alfa Jazz, took on an added poignancy, however, because of the
political turmoil afflicting the nation. Having assembled a trio especially for
the occasion, Neselovskyi forged a strong and meaningful bond with his bandmates
- bassist Daniel Loomis and drummer Ronen Itzik - through this act of musical
communion with his homeland.
That deeply emotional bond can be felt and heard throughout
Get Up and Go, Neselovskyi's first trio recording. The album, released May 19,
2017 via Jazz Family and Neuklang Records, shows off the range of emotions this
trio is able to summon, as well shining a spotlight on Neselovskyi's
compositional gifts, allowing him to conjure a remarkable symphonic sweep from
such limited instrumentation.
When Neselovskyi and his trio arrived at the Alfa Jazz
festival that June day, they had planned an upbeat, playful set appropriate to
an open-air summer festival. Only ten minutes before they were to take the
stage, the promoter announced that a Ukrainian military plane had been shot
down by separatists and that the entire country was in mourning. Neselovskyi
sat down at the piano, faced not with a crowd of eager revelers but with a
somber audience holding candles, tears streaming down their faces.
Changing the program on the fly, Neselovskyi opened the set
with a solo performance of "Krai," a poignant piece that quotes from
an Orthodox prayer, the raw feeling of which he replicates here. The trio
followed with "Get Up and Go," the piece that became the new album's
title track. Though the phrase connotes a feeling of energy and ambition in
English, Neselovskyi was unaware of the idiom when he originally composed it
(the song was originally recorded on Gary Burton's Next Generation album).
In the composer's mind, the phrase refers to a soldier,
wounded on the battlefield and lying on the ground, who wills him or herself to
rise and carry on. The tune's air of quiet but forceful resilience proved
especially resonant in the circumstances in which the artists and audience
alike found themselves that tense summer day. "The human soul is a
complicated thing, and we'll probably never understand how it works, but I can
say that I have a special connection to the place where I was born,"
Neselovskyi says. "Every time that I visit Ukraine or Russia, I think I'm
subconsciously searching for this feeling of home that I had when I was growing
up, but it cannot come back. That concert was a moment when I felt that I was
together with my people, as strongly together as maybe only tragedy can bring
people."
It was also a spontaneous shift in plans of which only a
smaller ensemble would have been capable. Given his taste for employing an
orchestral palette in his work, Neselovskyi had long resisted leading a trio.
"I think of myself primarily as a composer, and I always felt like my
music naturally required all these extra layers that a piano trio could not
give," he explains. Having gleaned a wide-ranging grasp of orchestration
from working in both orchestral writing and extensive solo performances in the
wake of his solo album Music for September, Neselovskyi began to change his
thinking, coming completely around upon discovering his significant chemistry
with Loomis and Itzik. "Suddenly I started to see possibilities for how a
trio could sound like an orchestra."
Not all of the music on Get Up and Go echoes the mournful
mood of the Alfa Jazz performance. The album begins in the sort of playful mood
that the trio originally had in mind that day, with the joyfully spiraling
"On a Bicycle," inspired by 20th-century Russian poet Yevgeny
Yevtushenko. "San Felio" evokes even sunnier climes, sparked by a
vacation on the Mediterranean and capturing the image of sunlight reflecting on
the sea as well as the sheer freedom and exuberance of getting away from it
all.
The muted, hauntingly slow "Winter," highlighted
by Loomis' wrenching arco bass, depicts the isolation and detachment embodied
by the coldest months of the year, while the dreamy "Station Taiga,"
featuring ethereal wordless vocals by Portugese singer Sara Serpa, gives that
mood a geographical location - the train station that marks the entryway to the
"infinite forest," the seemingly endless, snow-covered forest that
covers much of Siberia, Canada and Alaska.
"Who Is It?" picks up the pace again, with
frenetic, buoyant rhythms inspired by the folk music of Moldova and the Balkans
that Neseolvskyi heard as a child. "Prelude for Vibes" adapts the
title track of Next Generation, written with Gary Burton in mind, into a piano
trio version, while interludes featuring a Loomis solo and an atmospheric group
improvisation both culminate in the album's moody closer, "Almost
December," the delicate, first-snowfall stillness of which is hypnotically
enhanced by another appearance by Serpa.
The youngest student to be accepted into the Odessa
Conservatory (at age 15), Neslovskyi moved to Germany and finally to the US,
where he completed his studies at Berklee College of Music and the Thelonious
Monk Institute, where he was awarded a full scholarship as the pianist of an
ensemble handpicked by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Terence Blanchard.
During this time, he toured internationally with Hancock, Chaka Khan, Dee Dee
Bridgewater and Terri Lyne Carrington and shared the stage with artists such as
John Scofield, Terence Blanchard, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Benny Golson, Nicholas
Payton and Steve Coleman.
Neselovskyi's 2013 solo piano album Music for September was
produced by Fred Hersch and received wide critical praise including a 4-star
review in DownBeat. He has worked closely with another mentor, Gary Burton, for
the past twelve years, both performing with and composing for the master
vibraphonist. His next release will be a duo recording with French horn player
Arkady Shilkloper celebrating five years of collaboration, and he has plans for
an album of his orchestral compositions in the near future.
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