Label: Sunnyside Records, 2023

Personnel - David Behroozi: piano.

Following a well-received trio album of originals entitled Echos, American pianist Dahveed Behroozi releases Standard Fare, an intimate set of unaccompanied jazz standards that reflects his hybrid, non-traditional approach to music.

“All the Things You Are” draws the listener into his sound world with introspective temperament and poignancy in the chordal movements. This dreamlike ambience is suddenly interrupted by a swift keyboard flow infused with typically classical melodies. Once in a while, one can spot fragments of the main melody that, in a jiffy, dissolve into fluid jazz idioms. The aforementioned opener and the last track, Monk’s provocative “Trinkle Tinkle”, are the strongest of an album where spontaneous unfolding of phrases toggles between oblique and straightly leveled.

Another famous Monk tune brought to the set is “Round Midnight”, which goes from rubato to a sequence of unexpected phrasings delivered with variable pacing and bright harmonic color. Tempo is never a concern here, though. “I Love Paris” is tenderly expressed like a lullaby, carrying some wistfulness and melancholy that digs deep in emotion, whereas “East of the Sun” is treated like a pared-down nocturnal. Faithful to his crossbred variety of classical, jazz and new music elements, Behroozi shapes Rodgers and Hart’s popular tune “With a Song in My Heart” as a rhapsodic recital that still retains some of its innate original reflexes. Conversely, “Just One of Those Things” appears here with propulsive bass notes occasionally emphasized and altered melody.

Behroozi has crafted an accessible and listenable album of standards that, not matching his previous work, finds its own moods and sonic pathways.