Depress any key on an acoustic piano to hear just how illusory the whole idea of pitch really is. It’s easier to hear the fragmentation in the lower notes. As the pitch decays, it unravels and then disintegrates. That initial pitch is then revealed to be a component, a reference point amidst the myriad harmonics always inside but emerging from it. More than any of Craig Taborn’s other releases, Shadow Plays foregrounds these concerns with delicacy and calm assurance.
The first sounds spin enough of the yarn to facilitate immersion, intimating the complexities to come. The constant juxtaposition, the intertwining, of moment and long-term event makes the music more than difficult to encapsulate in the linearity required by written language. Taborn creates a universe of fire and ice, molten motives coalescing into what it would be inaccurate to call lines. They are brief melodic and rhythmic precisions, sonics in undulation and forward motion, captured in semi-static blocks.
The most amazing thing is that those coherencies combine to form mammoth constructions as unified as they are diverse. Only dip a tentative toe into “Bird Templars” to hear the overtones ensuring that the piano sound takes on an almost human vocal quality. Listen as each note is repeated to hear the subtly shaped vowels and ghostly phonemes of a human vocal phrase in creation. The most extraordinary occurrences evolve not in terms of pitch but overtone. They pulse and bloom, each hammer strike unleashing a gentle shower of upper frequencies. Only the finest pianos can do this and only under hands that have mastered the relationship between color and dynamics. Thriving on repetition, the entire texture self-replicates, additive interval processes culminating in the return, at 3:51, of the opening music. What of those melting octave and nearly inaudible but absolutely tangible single pitches, the D ghosting the distant harmonies. It would all be so beautifully impressionistic without that repeated pitch dragging it all toward modernity. That snarky tone has its foil, a kind of dreamy parallel, in the resonant lower-register interjections out of which careful listening reveals the shadows of all higher pitches emerging with riveting clarity, as at 8:08.
Miraculously, all is revealed to be a prelude for the gorgeous trip through a definite tonal center in which melodic pitches are allowed to complement and usurp notions of chord and line. Any remembered imbalance is dissolved in the steamy comfort of liquid harmony in constant evaporation, that is until, suddenly, at 11:24, it isn’t; in near silence, that rogue tone returns to throw all into the quiet chaos Taborn weaves with such stealth, such magical accuracy.
To suggest that the rest of the disc examines similar issues is to negate the many angles from which that exploration occurs. Moments reveal nothing and everything, like that miniscule scalar ascent 1:54 into “Discordia Conquers” or the pointillistic sparks lighting fires under the harmonic motion 2:21 into its doppelganger, “Concordia Discors.” The grandiose gestures inaugurating the titular piece dissolve into tiered harmonies both enhancing and subverting them. Maybe though, and this is the most difficult idea to square with my desire to unearth the various intricacies afoot in every pitch Taborn plays, simplicity is at the heart of it all. The repeated chordal figure succeeding those opening gestures does contain the proverbial multitudes via harmonics in full effect, but it’s reflective state is beyond denial. It settles, shaken out of what came before, shimmers while slowly increasing in intensity, that is until it doesn’t, until, at 1:24, a single sonority interrupts it only to prove a superficial blip on a vast calm surface. Returns demonstrate themselves to be equally illusory, mirroring the dualities of light and shadow at play throughout every sound captured in this, one of the deepest and most exquisite piano recordings it has ever been my privilege to experience.
