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THE DUO of Santiago de Cuba-born pianist Aruan Ortiz and Bronx-born clarinet troubadour of Antiguan roots Don Byron is a singularly potent one.
Their new record together Random Dances and (A)tonalities, recorded in Zurich, is an amalgam of diverse crucial influences, from Duke Ellington to JS Bach and from the Catalan pianist Tete Montoliu to the late keyboard genius Geri Allen. There is also a reinvention of tenor saxophonist Benny Golson’s hardbop theme Along Came Betty.
How they play together! Ortiz’s piano reflects Montoliu’s flamenco and pointillistic sound on Tete’s Blues before Byron’s clarinet comes chirruping in and Ortiz’s hard-struck chimes build brick-like solidity into the piece.
Then comes the haunting theme of Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy, with Byron’s tenor saxophone and Ortiz’s funereal comping straight out of the tradition.
With beautiful restraint, Byron plays in a buoyant high register through Musica Callada and his saxophone creates an earnest colloquy with Ortiz’s delving piano on Joe Btfspik. But it is Allen’s Dolphy’s Dance which really lifts the duo high, with Byron’s clarinet twirling and searching as Ortiz scampers and frolics along his keys.
Categories and genres dissolve into pure sound on Bach’s Violin Partita No. 1 in B Minor and it’s followed by Delphian Nuptials, inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s epochal anti-racist play A Raisin in the Sun, in which the crystalline lucidity of Byron’s clarinet riffs are earthed by Ortiz’s complex and emotive piano narrative.
Arabesques of a Geometrical Rose has some curlicuing phrases from Byron’s clarinet as if his sound were drawing a floral sketch in the sky while Ortiz’s piano explores cloudless regions.
The Benny Golson tribute Impressions of a Golden Theme, is a salute between generations, with one reed master and his piano compadre showing his love and recognition for a veteran. Somewhere under all the new notes and phrases, the improvisation and creative fire, is Golson’s familiar theme living again in reborn musical flesh forged by two divergent virtuosi.
Random Dances and (A)tonalities is released by Intakt.
