Kevin Hays: Variations

Kevin Hays, piano

Free-Flow and Form
Pianist Kevin Hays with ,,Variations", his solo album on Pirouet: an improviser's inexhaustible flow of ideas imbedded in form - music that appears to be classical yet deeply breathes in the spirit of jazz.



All at once it sounds so very different. But then it's not so different after all. Born in 1968, the American jazz pianist is a master of surprise and transformation. Even those who are fans of his music never know what his next CD will sound like. And with his PIROUET solo CD "Variations", once again he confounds and astounds. Here he plays music that often sounds like classical music, but it is clearly his own. And it is improvised! References to baroque counterpoint, romanticism, and modern classical are found here, at least as a musical vocabulary that has integrated into his own musical language. It is a musical language in which he creates moods - gripping, dense moods that organically merge into one another - and then return transformed, newly imbued, newly shaded. The CD contains 24 tracks with titles like ,,Bluetude", ,,Song for an Amiable Child" and ,,The Dervish of Harlem" - improvised atmospheric paintings and sonorous stories that Kevin Hays has developed out of the sketched-out ideas of basic themes. It all starts with a theme from Robert Schumann that Hays takes up and alters in order to create an extraordinarily distinctive room of sound fantasies. Hays' music is an exciting combination of free-association and strict form.

Price: $24.98