2010-02-23
Examiner.com Review by Neil Tesser
[a] hopefully welcome perspective on the powerful themes of race and humanity.
At first glance, Ryan Cohan does not call to mind your typical African explorer. At six-foot-something tall, he stoops a bit to lean in during conversation; with his shaved head and goatee and soft-spoken manner, he more closely resembles a rabbinical student than a world-traveled jazz pianist, about to premiere a suite based on a tour through south central Africa.
Cohan’s piece, The River, makes its debut in three separate performances this week, ranging from Oak Park to Lake Forest to Chicago’s north side. (See below.) All of them feature the deep, polished sextet that has formed the vehicle for his substantial writing over the last couple of years, manned by some of the city’s strongest mainstream jazz artists – including saxophonists Geof Bradfield and John Wojciechowski and trumpeter Tito Carrillo – augmented by percussionist Victor Gonzalez.
A sparkling pianist, best known around Chicago for his work in trumpeter Orbert Davis’s bands, Cohan caught national ears at the beginning of this decade with Here And Now, a set of original compositions noted for their forceful melodies and resonant, sophisticated tonal coloration. He took big strides with One Sky in 2007, extending his command of the same materials with increased authority and nuance.
For all those reasons, jazz audiences had already anticipated Cohan’s new work; hearing him describe it raises expectations further.
“It’s inspired by a tour I did with my quartet in 2008, as part of the Rhythm Road project of Lincoln Center Jazz. I’d been writing a lot for my sextet, and trying to blur the line between composition and improvisation. In writing jazz pieces, I’m always looking to find more freedom within that structure – more ways to loosen it up.
“In The River, I wanted to explore the idea of a written theme with a lot of freedom in it, which can be woven between different sections of a long-term composition. I had the idea of a series of vignettes, depicting places, experiences, emotions, all tied together by a musical stream.”
Cohan ended up with eight distinct movements, interspersed with and connected by a common theme. But that theme is not a fixed melody, as might be expected. Rather, says Cohan, each new iteration of this connecting device “is derived from some simple motifs, some familiar material, but improvised. It’s about each player coming to the material individually, with very little direction.” (In this sense, the methodology recalls that of Miles Davis’s landmark Kind Of Blue, for which the members of his band were given only slight structural suggestions to encourage new liberties in their approach.)
“The River is really about balancing each player’s contributions with the written work,” says Cohan. That explains the theoretical underpinnings of the writing; the inspiration itself comes from a somewhat less analytical faculty.
“We went to Uganda, Congo, Zimbabwe, and Rwanda, and the human experience of visiting these places was so amazing – the sense of being connected to these universal themes, even though it’s such a foreign place. There’s a real opportunity to be part of these places; you can make a difference just by being interested.
“Our last week of the tour was in Rwanda, and that one was very heavy, and very inspirational. The biggest thing I knew about, of course, was the genocide of 1994. I wanted to talk to someone about it, but how do you bring that up? The tenor of the people was very warm and friendly, though they were a little more closed than the other Africans we’d met; you could feel the country still recovering, nearly 15 years later. I didn’t ask too many questions, but the last day we went to this genocide museum, built on a graveyard of 250,000 bodies underneath the museum, and it was amazing. It was one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had; it definitely influenced the new work.”
As Black History Month winds down, Cohan’s new work offers an and hopefully welcome perspective on the powerful themes of race and humanity.
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 | Another Look
Another Look grooves heavily in the sure hands of Cohan's explosive & dynamic quartet. |  listen
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 | One Sky
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