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Tigran Hamaysan, The Stables, Wavendon, review
Tigran Hamaysan at The Stables, Wavendon, had something urgent to say.
Mixing folk with jazz: virtuoso Armenian pianist Tigran Hamaysan
Photo: Vahan Stepanyan
By Ivan Hewett
Daily Telegraph/UK
12:24PM GMT 27 Jan 2012
Being a virtuoso art, jazz produces prodigies just as miraculous as
those in classical music. The Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan is one
of them. At the age of three he was picking out his father's favourite
rock songs at the piano, and at nine had moved on to his uncle's
passion for Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. By the age of nineteen
he'd moved with his family to California, won the Thelonious Monk
competition and inspired awe in senior pianists such as Chick Corea.
As is often the way, this musical emigre has found that distance lends
an unexpected enchantment to his native roots. You could feel them
pulling right from the start of this gig, which drew on material from
his recent album A Fable. Hamasyan has become fascinated by the folk
music of Armenia, which in his hands sounds more Balkan than near
Eastern, turning round and round a plangent modal note with folk-like
obsessiveness.
Hamasyan is a slight, narrow-shouldered, darkly intense figure, who
often sings as he bends low over the keyboard. Much of the time he
focuses on the mid-range of the piano, as if unconsciously echoing the
limitations of folk instruments. Then he remembers he's actually
playing the piano and the hands shoot away into Bud-Powell like flares
of virtuosity, or freeze on sudden moments of luminous stillness where
the piano rings like a bell.
This evocation of a distance from something longed-for is sharpened by
his subtle harmonic sense, which often gestures towards Chopin's
mazurka-melancholy and Bartok's folk arrangements. He loves to suck
the marrow from a particular interval, placing it in different
contexts to reveal its many implications. The sense of fixity this
brings is hard to escape.
Hamasyan was some minutes into My Prince will Come before he found a
jazz-like flexibility.
At moments like this it becomes clear that Hamasyan does have a real
jazz sensibility after all, something which until that point you might
have doubted (as some of the disgruntled jazz fans here clearly did).
In his efforts to catch something wild he sometimes pushes those
circling folkish patterns too far, and the awkward join between the
two halves of his musical persona sometimes shows.
But the occasional discomforts are a price well worth paying. There
are many brilliant and perfectly finished young jazz pianists around,
but Hamasyan stands out because he has something important and urgent
to say.
Tigran Hamasyan's `A Fable' is out now on Verve. He appears at St
George's, Bristol (0845 4024 001), on March 1
Tigran Hamaysan at The Stables, Wavendon, had something urgent to say.
Mixing folk with jazz: virtuoso Armenian pianist Tigran Hamaysan
Photo: Vahan Stepanyan
By Ivan Hewett
Daily Telegraph/UK
12:24PM GMT 27 Jan 2012
Being a virtuoso art, jazz produces prodigies just as miraculous as
those in classical music. The Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan is one
of them. At the age of three he was picking out his father's favourite
rock songs at the piano, and at nine had moved on to his uncle's
passion for Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. By the age of nineteen
he'd moved with his family to California, won the Thelonious Monk
competition and inspired awe in senior pianists such as Chick Corea.
As is often the way, this musical emigre has found that distance lends
an unexpected enchantment to his native roots. You could feel them
pulling right from the start of this gig, which drew on material from
his recent album A Fable. Hamasyan has become fascinated by the folk
music of Armenia, which in his hands sounds more Balkan than near
Eastern, turning round and round a plangent modal note with folk-like
obsessiveness.
Hamasyan is a slight, narrow-shouldered, darkly intense figure, who
often sings as he bends low over the keyboard. Much of the time he
focuses on the mid-range of the piano, as if unconsciously echoing the
limitations of folk instruments. Then he remembers he's actually
playing the piano and the hands shoot away into Bud-Powell like flares
of virtuosity, or freeze on sudden moments of luminous stillness where
the piano rings like a bell.
This evocation of a distance from something longed-for is sharpened by
his subtle harmonic sense, which often gestures towards Chopin's
mazurka-melancholy and Bartok's folk arrangements. He loves to suck
the marrow from a particular interval, placing it in different
contexts to reveal its many implications. The sense of fixity this
brings is hard to escape.
Hamasyan was some minutes into My Prince will Come before he found a
jazz-like flexibility.
At moments like this it becomes clear that Hamasyan does have a real
jazz sensibility after all, something which until that point you might
have doubted (as some of the disgruntled jazz fans here clearly did).
In his efforts to catch something wild he sometimes pushes those
circling folkish patterns too far, and the awkward join between the
two halves of his musical persona sometimes shows.
But the occasional discomforts are a price well worth paying. There
are many brilliant and perfectly finished young jazz pianists around,
but Hamasyan stands out because he has something important and urgent
to say.
Tigran Hamasyan's `A Fable' is out now on Verve. He appears at St
George's, Bristol (0845 4024 001), on March 1