Belgian Jazz pianist Jef Neve is possibly best known for his collaboration with singer José James on the excellent duet album from 2010, ‘For all we know’. However, Neve has longed wanted to test himself out in that most challenging of settings, namely the solo piano. This latest project was put together while touring and thus it was recorded at six separate studios over a thirteen day period. Similar to Duke Ellington, Jef Neve has drawn compositional inspiration from his travels and in this case that has meant writing while in hotels, airport lounges or on a tour bus. The pieces performed here are at once accessible and challenging in parts, but it is the sheer simplicity of style that will appeal to jazz devotees. That said, there is an experimental take on Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Lush Life’ with a crescendo of sounds created on the piano before the pieces settles into the most sedate of numbers while Joni Mitchell’s ‘A case of you’ is treated to a quasi-classical rendition that is reposing in nature. Of the pianist’s originals, the lyrical ‘One leaf, a thousand lives’ impresses most and builds up a head of steam. This is not an album that instantly attracts the listener’s attention, but on repeated listens its subtle delicacy begins to emerge and will leave a lasting and favourable impression.
I'm nominated for 2 of the Music Industry Awards, category 'best musician' and 'best composer'! I want to thank all the people who supported me this year, my fans and my crew, because without them, there would be no nomination at all! follow ore vote on mias.een.be
With an ornate, highly elaborate improvising style that joins the dots between the otherwise disparate approaches of McCoy Tyner and Keith Jarrett while also drawing heavily on the traditions of the Romantic-era classical composers, earlier albums of Neve’s such as 2007’s Nobody is Illegal – particularly on a track such as the extraordinary ‘Nothing But A Casablanca Turtle Slide-Show Dinner’ with its baroque chamber exuberance somehow in the mind’s eye of an improviser who knows his post-Beatles pop and jazz culture as much as he does classical music – made it clear that a big fully formed new talent had landed in our midst.
Neve is up there with the best new generation European jazz pianists (in the same bracket as players such as Michael Wollny, Gwilym Simcock, Iiro Rantala, and Stefano Bollani) at ease in classical and contemporary jazz contexts, his signature style entertaining a strong contrapuntal dimension, vaultingly exuberant at times but crucially also capable of huge tenderness and improvisational clarity.
While mostly a solo piano album, although ‘Flying to Diani Beach’ towards the end has added brass, One is a little more restrained and of course much more intimate (this scintillating track a notable bravura exception) than some of his earlier work, recorded during a marathon 13 days in a variety of European studios including La Chapelle and Blue Tree in Belgium and at Abbey Road in London, and includes Neve’s own compositions and fine versions of Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Lush Life’ – a standard the pianist performed with singer José James on 2010’s For All We Know – and Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You.’ Neve’s reputation as a top class improviser can only accelerate as a result of this excellent album.
Jamie Cullum nodigde Jef Neve uit om mee te spelen in de North Sea Jazz Club, en Café Corsari was erbij. Geniet van de live versie van Make Someone Happy!
