Geoff Keezer Zero One CD - Import

This acoutsic solo piano effort by Keezer is not your typical collection of standards or lounge jazz. Instead, Keezer incorporates many elements of jazz expressionism, a few 20th century contemporary precepts, and chamber music approaches. It's quite a beautiful mix: melodically rich and texturally vibrant, all the while boldly italicizing Keezer's stance as a brilliant first-degree improviser of modern music. The vast majority of these 15 selections written by Keezer are introspective. "These Three Words," for example, exudes reverential resonance in waltz tempo, "Asadoya Yunta" is a hymn-like, Okinawan-based theme somewhat like "Someone to Watch Over Me," while "Letdown/Hypnogong" holds folk-type melodies close to heart. Cascading, improvised phrases tumble from Keezer's fingers on "Cybergrrrl"; a rich, Steve Reich-like, repetitive minimalism strikes up both "Hibiscus" and the somehow familiar, heavier ruminations of "Wild Card." There's also the lugubriously slow drip of Billy Strayhorn's "Blood Count," the patient two-beat version of Ellington's "Black & Tan Fantasy," and the "I'll Be Home for Christmas"/church-like "Across the Universe." At his most animated during a supercharged "Footprints," Keezer plays ridiculously and delightfully fast in a modal-three beat. Also uppity is a foundation of popping, bopping hyperglycemic rhythm in "Maple Sugar Rays." Keezer mixes sunrise peacefulness with "Embraceable You" sentiments and a reggae beat during "Venus as a Boy," and galactic "Born Free" leaps and bounds during Life on Mars." He assimilates synthesized sounds from overdubbed and sampled acoustic piano during "Fractured," combining African congas and bata drums, rimshot clicks, afuche shakes, and zither string zings as underpinnings for his classical-type piano musings. "Sleep Flying" uses overdubbed, treated acoustic piano -- both spatial and spiritual -- in a deep, dense rubato fashion that would make Fred Van Hove, a master of this idiom, take notice. Ever striving for new means of playing jazz, the challenged, creative musician must also be mindful that he's playing for people's enjoyment; Keezer succeeds on both levels here, on a recording that should leave no universally minded soul disappointed. Highly recommended. ~ Michael G. Nastos

Recorded at David L. Abell Fine Pianos Studio A, Los Angeles, California in June 1999.

Solo performer: Geoff Keezer (piano).

6th RelJazzTimes (6/00, p.118) - "...A solo piano recording that is as adventurous as it is grounded in pure musicality....hints at the emergence of a new jazz pianism."