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Denny Zeitlin: Crazy Rhythm: Exploring George Gershwin

Denny Zeitlin's jazz career began when he sat in as the featured pianist on flutist Jeremy Steig's Flute Fever (Columbia Records, 1964). He followed this up with his debut as a leader on Columbia Records' 1964 album Cathexis. While maintaining another successful career as a psychiatrist and college professor, he released more than a dozen albums over the next quarter century, most of them acoustic piano sets, plus a few experimental electronic outings, along with a groundbreaking electro/orchestral soundtrack to the 1978 remake of the science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

At the turn of the century, Zeitlin had established himself as a top-level, if somewhat underrecognized, jazz talent. Then, in 2001, he found a home at Sunnyside Records, a connection that turned into a late-career profile boost that resulted in some of the pianist's finest recordings. In addition to his Sunnyside home, Zeitlin also found a home at Oakland's Piedmont Piano Company, where he presents yearly solo recitals focusing on individual composers. In 2014 it was saxophonist Wayne Shorter, resulting in the album Early Wayne (Sunnyside, 2016); in 2016 it was Miles Davis, for Remembering Miles (Sunnyside, 2019). And now, for 2023, we have Crazy Rhythm: Exploring George Gershwin.

As he did with the music of Davis and Shorter, Zeitlin reimagines the music of Gershwin. Improvisation on the themes is front and center. One of Gershwin's most famous tunes, "Summertime," is not readily recognizable in the opening minutes, as Zeitlin rambles, circling around what will soon gel into the familiar melody. Then he drifts away again, with great elegance, rolling into finessed, off-the-cuff segments steeped in the mood of the piece. It is worth noting that "Summertime" is one of three tunes chosen from Gershwin's 1935 American-language opera, Porgy And Bess. Inspired by the Miles Davis/Gil Evans 1959 Columbia Records reimagination of the work, he includes, besides "Summertime," "Bess You Is My Woman Now," "The Man I Love," and "My Man's Gone Now" here.

"How Long Has This Been Going On?" is here, too. So is "S'Wonderful, "It Ain't Necessarily So," "Fascinating Rhythm," "By Strauss, "I've Got A Crush On You" and "I Was Doing All Right." A spin through the set bolsters the opinion that nobody could write a popular tune containing a combination of deft grace and uncommon intelligence better than George Gershwin—an American treasure if ever there was one. And nobody plays them with more style and celebration of their charm and their simplicity/complexity dynamic—adding his own distinctive layers of complexity—better than Denny Zeitlin.