Promises Kept

Steve Kuhn describes “Promises Kept”, a programme of original compositions in which his piano is flanked by a string ensemble, as the realization of “a life’s dream”. In the liner notes, critic Bob Blumenthal observes that “Kuhn, a pianist who has displayed many and diverse strengths in a career now in its fifth decade, has reached a point where melody and feeling have taken centre stage…In giving full reign to his emotions, Kuhn has created both his most personal and his most beautiful recording.”

Steve Kuhn with Strings… Kuhn’s lyrical improvisations and the bold contours of his melodies - some old, some new – are set against nuanced string arrangements, by Kuhn and by Carlos Franzetti, who is also the orchestrator on “Promises Kept”. The album is both a ‘departure’ from Kuhn’s work of recent years and an extension of projects begun at least 40 years ago.

One of Steve Kuhn’s best-loved pieces carries the autobiographical title “Life’s Backward Glance”. It is reprised here, along with other favourites - “Trance”, “Oceans In The Sky”, “Lullaby”. And there is an autobiographical flavour to the album as a whole: “Promises Kept” tells us something of who Kuhn is, and how he got this way. Dedicated to the memory of his parents, Hungarian immigrants from Budapest, the project hovers between American and European atmospheres, between jazz and romanticism, between improvised flights and a strong sense of form, and the music expresses both yearning and nostalgia.

Though Hungarian echoes are evoked in the music, New York connections are stronger. When the Brooklyn-born Kuhn returned to New York from Boston in 1960 he plotted his jazz career from a rented room on Broadway, an address that has more than incidental meaning in “Promises Kept” and not only because of Carlos Franzetti’s involvement in soundtrack work, or bassist David Finck’s experiences in musical theatre. A “filmic” undertone is palpable throughout, and while listening it is easy to imagine cameras panning the Manhattan skyline.

At the same time, “Promises Kept” has more experimental roots in a period when jazz and classical music were looking longingly at each other. In the late 1950s Kuhn attended the famed Lenox School of Jazz where fellow students included Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and vibist/composer Gary McFarland. Modern Jazz Quartet founder John Lewis and “Third Stream” initiator Gunther Schuller were amongst the teachers, and the idea of a new form, somewhere between jazz improvisation and ‘classical’ structural rigour, was very much in the air. In 1966, Kuhn and McFarland reconvened to make one of the enduringly important between-the-genres statements, “The October Suite”, for Impulse, a recording now regarded as a landmark by cognoscenti. Kuhn had always yearned to return to its chamber music colours and sensibility. But if Kuhn is revisiting his musical past, it is with heightened knowledge. As Blumenthal points out, “there are distinct differences between ‘The October Suite’, where Kuhn and trio improvised within the chamber-music environments that McFarland generated, and the present collection, where Kuhn’s own compositions provide the frames for each performance. The focus has shifted here to a body of work that is rare in its lyricism and originality. Kuhn has long had a capacity for creating indelible melodic notions and developing them with a sure sense of drama and unpredictable logic. His compositions rarely unfold with symmetrical regularity; like streams seeking their own course, they twist and surge, gaining emotional power in their turns from quiet reflection to bold passion”. (This mercurial unpredictability has been a factor linking Kuhn, as a soloist, to Charlie Parker. The influence is still obvious, and the specific territory staked out by “Promises Kept” can also be easily related to the Bird-with-Strings projects that Parker initiated in 1951, early instances of jazz music striving to liberate itself from the limits of the form.)

While planning “Promises Kept”, Kuhn, casting around for an orchestrator/arranger, was frequently recommended to seek out Carlos Franzetti. Bob Bluementhal: “It turned out that Franzetti, a pianist himself, was also a Kuhn fan of longstanding who not only knew the latter’s work, but could also sing lyrics to songs that Kuhn had written 30 years ago from memory. With Kuhn providing a general directive to ‘make it beautiful but not background music, be spare and heartrending,’ Franzetti fashioned arrangements that allowed piano and ensemble to blend seamlessly while constantly serving the melodic material at hand. One can sense Franzetti’s affinity for this music in the introductory passages he has crafted for several tracks, and in the grace with which each arrangement unfolds.”