Credits:

Lara Driscoll Trio

Description:

Lara Driscolls debut album, 2020s Woven Dreams, showcases the Chicago pianists delicate and intricately crafted post-bop jazz. Joining her are her trio bandmates, bassist Paul Rushka and drummer Dave Laing. Together they play a harmonically nuanced brand of straight-ahead acoustic jazz that brings to mind the virtuosic approach of classic artists like Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans, as well as contemporary players like Fred Hersch and the late Geri Allen. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Montreals McGill University, Driscoll has played with such luminaries as Terell Stafford, Chip McNeill, Jean-Michel Pilc, and many others. She also teaches on the faculty at Loyola University, DePaul University, and Harold Washington College. All of which is to say that she brings a high level of experience and skill to her first album as a leader. Here, she primarily focuses on her engaging original compositions, with a handful of standards peppered throughout, including a fluid take on Autumn in New York and a dusky rendition of Billy Strayhorns poetic Isfahan. Not simply content to play a basic head arrangement, Driscoll favors extended introductions and outros that spotlight her thoughtful compositional ear. She applies a similarly measured approach to her original works, engaging in kinetic contrapuntal interplay with her bandmates on the flamenco-tinged Siblings and sinking with slowly nodding deliberation into the atmospheric ballad Mamy Adieu. At the core of the album is the three-part Forgiving - Black Dog Skirts Away. Beginning with an atmospheric tone poem, it finds Driscoll steadily expanding upon the thematic and harmonic material over the three separate movements in what ends up feeling like a mini film-noir soundtrack. Also compelling is her ebulliently funky version of Antonio Carlos Jobims O Morro Nao Tem Vez (Favela) and her brisk reading of Cole Porters Just One of Those Things. Driscoll ends Woven Dreams with her impressionistic title-track ballad, a nod to her penchant for wearing scarfs and a perfect metaphor for the airy, effortlessly layered music on display here. ~ Matt Collar

Tracklisting:

1.Autumn in New York
2.Siblings
3.Airport Limbo
4.Forgiving, Black Dog Skirts Away: I. Forgiving
5.Forgiving, Black Dog Skirts Away: II. Black Dog
6.Forgiving, Black Dog Skirts Away: III. Skirts Away
7.O Morro Nao Tem Vez (Favela)
8.Mamy Adieu
9.Trespassers
10.Isfahan
11.Just One of Those Things
12.Ecmt (Intro)
13.Ecmt Blues
14.Woven Dreams