Howard Riley: Constant Change 1976-2016

Rating: ★★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Howard Riley (solo p)

Label:

NoBusiness NBCD 91-95

March/2017

RecordDate:

March 1976-April 2016

Material from the second disc here appeared on a small-run cassette issue back in 1992, but otherwise this 5CD sequel to Howard Riley's 2011 boxset The Complete Short Stories anthologises over five hours' worth of previously unreleased music. Constant Change proves an apt title. Recorded live in Paris in 1976, Thelonious Monk's ‘Misterioso’ haunts Riley's ‘Ice’, providing harmonic landmarks around which his other material floats. Seven years later, during studio recordings made in London, the cyclic rhythmic loops which characterise that same Monk composition become the base alchemy of ‘Eleven In Three’ – while ‘In Repose’, which follows, concerns itself once again with the melodic essence of Monk's enigma wrapped inside a riddle. ‘Fingerprints’, the title-track of the second CD, deals in Monkian parallel tenths smudged by slithery chromaticism, and you realise how deeply Monk runs through Riley's jazz DNA, not just as a stylistic launch pad, but more as a fully functional language. The final three discs are devoted to ‘Mutability (Longer Story)’, three free-standing hour-long structures (an installment each recorded in 2014, 2015 and 2016) which offer three panoramic perspectives on the same pool of gestures and harmonic obsessions – this music is forever changeable, yes, but has its constants too.

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