Label: Lafayette Music, 2019
Personnel - Lafayette Gilchrist: piano.
Baltimore-based pianist Lafayette Gilchrist, a member of David Murray Black Saint Quartet, has not been documented that thoroughly throughout his career. His newest CD, Dark Matter, marks his second solo effort and was inspired by the invisible force that holds the universe together. Played with freedom and recorded live, the 11 original compositions that compose the album come to life as a hub of styles, embracing jazz in a variety of currents - funk, blues, and almost indistinct hints of hip hop.
Regardless the amount of variations and contrasts that his music has to offer, Gilchrist coaxes the blues out of almost every note he plays. The genre irrigates tunes such as the chunky “For The Go Go”, a homage to the Baltimore-Washington D.C. funk subgenre go-go music (a unique regional style with which the pianist is very familiar); “And You Know This”, whose faintly spiritual aura is swallowed by a rock n’ roll-ish cadence that is also vividly felt on “Happy Birthday Sucka”; and “Blues For Our Marches To End”, a strutter written in 2014 as a reaction to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
The pianist stirs “The Love Bind” with his disciplined stride piano technique, placing the bass notes in constant counterpoint with the ideas and flourishes delivered by an agile right hand. In turn, “Spontaneous Combustion”, whose title may suggest some sort of avant-garde spontaneity, starts with classical-like movements that, little by little, are overcome by a resolutely paced rockish cadenza. However, its flow keeps being interrupted by quieter lyrical segments. This sort of rhythmic variations are also a constant on “Child’s Play”, whose mutable parts beautifully integrate heartfelt melodies, bluesy figures, and soulful chords. There’s some sort of playfulness amidst the predominant affectionate tones.
Gilchrist’s sense of phrasing is fluent yet veers to pondering whenever the narrative demands it. To my ears, the darker and more reflective tunes are by far the most interesting. The haunting title cut, for example, bears this dark-hued, Horace Tapscott-fueled post-bop feel populated by subversive notes that simultaneously shock and astound. While implying a strolling tempo and negotiating lower regions, the pianist brandishes a marvel of a tune.
In the same line of the latter, the poignant “Old Whale Bones”, inspired by archeological digs, drifts with no apparent destination until vehement, boisterous chords finalize its journey, while on “Black Flight”, a melancholic tribute to the African-American WWII fighter pilots Tuskegee Airmen, Gilchrist covers the range of the keyboard in order to fuse dramatic, mournful, and enigmatic sounds with logic and precision.
Balancing elated and ruminative moods and ideas, Dark Matter is a valid, yet unexceptional offering from a mature pianist who doesn't give up searching for exposure.
Grade B-
Favorite Tracks:
02 - Child’s Play ► 03 - Dark Matter ► 08 - Old Whale Bones