CD review: Ari Hoenig Trio – Conner’s Days 2019: Video, CD cover

Among the most influential drummers in jazz, Ari Hoenig has re-defined the concept of melodic playing on the drum set.

The Philadelphia native made an early statement of purpose as a member of the prestigious One O’Clock Lab Band at the University of North Texas, and moved to New York within a year, working with iconoclastic French pianist Jean-Michel Pilc’s take-no-prisoners trio and a host of jazz greats including Kenny Werner, Chris Potter, Shirley Scott, Wayne Krantz, Richard Bona, and Mike Stern.

A gifted composer beyond his preternatural abilities as a percussionist, Hoenig has issued a string of fine albums for the Smalls and Dreyfus labels beginning with 2000’s solo drum session Time Travels, followed by the masterful 2002 quartet album The Painter featuring Pilc and SFJAZZ Collective bassist Matt Penman. Hoenig’s newest album, The Pauper & the Magician, is a darkly evocative and rhythmically slippery quintet session that began as the musical depiction of a fairy tale he told his young children, with a decidedly Eastern European sensibility.

Tracklist:

1. Conner’s Days
2. All the Things You Are
3. Anymore
4. Prelude to a Kiss
5. For Tracy
6. Figuration
7. Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
8. All of You
9. Guernsey St. Gooseneck
10. In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning
11. Up
12. Conner’s Days Reprise