Gwilym Simcock: Near and Now

Editor's Choice

Rating: ★★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Gwilym Simcock (p)

Label:

ACT

May/2019

Media Format:

CD

Catalogue Number:

9883-2

RecordDate:

November 2018

This follow-up to Simcock's Mercury Prize-shortlisted 2011 ACT debut, the brilliant Good Days At Schloss Elmau, was penned primarily on the road while the pianist was touring the world as part of the Pat Metheny Quartet. Recorded by Simcock at his home in Berlin on a beautifully rich Steinway Model B Grand Piano, the album pays tribute to five of Simcock's piano heroes who have had an especial impact on his music. Dedicated to Billy Childs, the three-movement album opener ‘Beautiful Is Our Moment’ features some of Simcock's mos exuberant, joyous writing, with its elegiac coda providing the final surprise. If ‘Before The Elegant Hour’ (for Brad Mehldau) possesses a rough-hewn grandeur, the brief ‘You're My You’ (dedicated to Simcock's first jazz piano teacher, Les Chisnall) is a touching jazz chorale, while ‘Inveraray Air’ (for Russell Ferrante) is marked by a profound lyricism and a dramatic textural stripping away at the close. Dedicated to Egberto Gismonti, the concluding three-movement, ‘Many Worlds Away’, ranges from the hieratic to the rhapsodic to the ecstatic. What binds all of the music together is Simcock's fulsome tone, clarity of line and the way in which his seemingly effortless pianism carves out hugely satisfying harmonic journeys.

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