If you’ve ever seen Snarky Puppy co-founder Bill Laurance performing live you’ll know that his sets often include an unaccompanied solo. His last studio album, Cables, leaned heavily into synthesisers and effects, but was essentially a solo recording. With Affinity, his eighth album as leader, Laurance releases his first collection of unaccompanied and purely acoustic piano music.
The album was conceived and executed in under three weeks, and there’s a clarity of purpose and emotional directness to his attractively balanced programme. The spacious studio sound should appeal to ECM scholars and admirers of Vikingur Ólafsson’s recent DG output alike, and it serves Laurance well as he traverses that familiar space between classical and improvised music.
It should be noted that Laurance’s improvised passages rarely go out on a limb, with even the most rubato passages sticking pretty close to the compositional contours. It’s a balance that certainly won’t please everybody, but Laurance is such a phenomenally gifted composer that many simply won’t care.
Pillars rises from firm harmonic foundations, its nostalgic refrain recalling Jarrett’s devotional side. The gentle ebb and flow of Storm harbours ghostly overtones, possibly explained by Laurance’s lining of the piano strings with felt to subtly alter its dynamic range. The dancing title track, the achingly pensive In Good Faith and the simple song-like purity of Sirens see Laurance at his most assured – a magnificent central triptych, and sufficient reason alone to recommend the album.
Less successful are some rather stiff echoes of 20th century impressionism on Everything Exists, and although the two pieces associated with Laurance’s hero Bill Evans are tackled with real sensitivity they add little to the canon. House Of The Rising Sun on the other hand is a finely nuanced triumph, Laurance’s allusions to romanticism and early blues hitting home in an entirely unexpected way.
Discography:
Pillars; Storm; Everything Exists; Affinity; In Good Faith; Sirens; House Of The Rising Sun Peace Piece; A Child Is Born; Home (47.09)
Laurance (p). London, May 2022.
Flint CD/LP 014
