Tigran Hamasyan explores the Great American Songbook on new album StandArt – video track preview of Elmo Hope’s ‘De-Dah’
Mike Flynn
Thursday, February 17, 2022
The celebrated pianist is to release his first ever jazz standards album on Nonesuch on 29 April with guest appearances by Ambrose Akinmusire, Joshua Redman and Mark Turner
Known for his adventurous blend of his native Armenian folk music with acoustic, electronic and rock sounds, pianist Tigran Hamasyan is set to release his first album exploring classic American jazz standards on his new Nonesuch album, StandArt. The album features songs from the 1920s through the 1950s, by Richard Rodgers, Charlie Parker, Jerome Kern, David Raksin, and others alongside a piece Hamasyan improvised with his bandmates – bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Justin Brown – and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, who is featured on two of the album’s tracks.
Other special guests on the album include saxophonist and label-mate Joshua Redman on Charlie Parker’s ‘Big Foot’, as well as saxophonist Mark Turner on Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s ‘All the Things You Are’. The all-acoustic album is in contrast to the powerful electronically-charged sound of 2020’s The Call Within, this time with his improvisational prowess finding him stretching out across the album’s inventive reworkings of the Standards repertoire with his trademark time-stretching polyrhythms and more rhapsodic episodes also part of the mix.
StandArt is available to pre-order here, with an instant download of Hamasyan’s rendition of Elmo Hope’s ‘De-Dah’, the video for which can be seen below.
For more info visit www.nonesuch.com/artists/tigran-hamasyan