Ethan Iverson: Every Note Is True
Author: Stuart Nicholson
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Musicians: |
Ethan Iverson (p) |
Label: |
Blue Note 3897500 |
Magazine Review Date: |
March/2022 |
Media Format: |
CD, DL |
RecordDate: |
Rec. date not stated |
It wasn’t just Boris Johnson at the COP 26 climate conference reawakening memories of Kermit the Frog. Iverson does a pretty a fair impression himself with his vocal on the album’s opening track, ‘The More It Changes’, complete with, or so it seems, the entire Muppets cast. After this somewhat unnerving opening, Iverson’s Blue Note debut progresses through a further eight originals, plus ‘Blue’ by DeJohnette (from the album Gateway 2). ‘Eternal Verities,’ replete with plagal cadences, is a little bit Mrs Mills, while there are over-the-shoulder glances at the 17 years he spent in Bad Plus, “It could never be The Bad Plus without Reid and Dave, but some of that bright big piano is back,” he says. But what was new and fresh back then isn’t necessarily new and fresh today.
Throughout, the feeling pervades of fairly average material that Iverson’s playing is not quite able to lift out of the ordinary. He tends to be a bit rhythmically stiff, as is his fingering, especiallysemi-quavers (sixteenth notes), while the compositions broadly follow the same trajectory – a pianissimo exposition that builds to forte climax and winds back down, with the forte bit coming with Bad Plus-like pounding chords. Reviewed on files via Dropbox, you kind of know what you’re in for when clicking on each number as the dynamics of each track (the highs and lows) betray the schemata.

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