STILLPOINT is the primary album in 12 years from pianist Awadagin Pratt.

Rob Davidson/Courtesy of the artist

disguise caption

toggle caption

Rob Davidson/Courtesy of the artist

STILLPOINT is the primary album in 12 years from pianist Awadagin Pratt.

Rob Davidson/Courtesy of the artist

Few phrases describe the pianist Awadagin Pratt higher than “overachiever.” The Pittsburgh native started racking up awards within the early Nineteen Nineties, together with first place within the Naumburg Worldwide Piano Competitors (as the primary Black artist to win the prize) and the profitable Avery Fisher Profession Grant. He signed with a marquee label, and made visitor appearances on the likes of the Immediately Present, Good Morning America, Sesame Road and even the White Home. He is additionally a triple menace, the primary scholar within the historical past of Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory of Music to earn simultaneous levels in piano, violin and conducting. However for all the bottom he is lined, there’s one place Pratt has been conspicuously absent from recently — the recording studio.

Now, at 57, poised to start a brand new professorship on the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Pratt has simply launched his first album in 12 years, STILLPOINT. Fairly than merely pop right into a studio to report a couple of warhorse favorites, the pianist devoted 5 years of cautious thought to the discharge, commissioning new items from six composers.

Within the album’s liner notes, Pratt factors to one among his favourite poems, T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” as his inspiration for making a physique of labor about “seemingly diametrically opposed energies” and the wrestle to stability these opposing forces in on a regular basis life. As his musical companions, Pratt tapped the agile, finely honed string orchestra A Far Cry and the experimental vocal group Roomful of Enamel. The end result is not merely well worth the wait; it’s maybe the best album of his profession.

Pratt handed every of his composers some strains from Eliot’s poem as a jumping-off level. Jessie Montgomery‘s Rounds, which opens the album, already has a lifetime of its personal — Pratt has carried out the work with 30 orchestras since he debuted it within the spring of 2022, a uncommon feat of visibility for such a brand new piece. Montgomery’s music quantities to a miniature piano concerto that performs with opposites, deploying new harmonies inside previous constructions. That construction permits Pratt an improvised cadenza the place, in a single passage, he actually leans into the piano to pluck notes.

The album’s title is a motif in Eliot’s poem, the place references to “the nonetheless level of the turning world” conjure areas which might be each immense and exact. Composer Tyshawn Sorey distills that concept into one thing untethered in Untitled Composition for Piano and Eight Voices. The wispy vocals of Roomful of Enamel and Pratt’s lonely tolling piano recall to mind the huge, quiet areas of Morton Feldman and the featherlight atmosphere of Brian Eno.

Paola Prestini takes the T.S. Eliot immediate one step additional, digging into love letters the poet wrote to a schoolteacher. In the end, Eliot denied his emotions, however Prestini’s Code explores the unknowable cusp between avowal and denial. Bookended by fowl calls — uncanny vocalizations by Enamel singers — the music unfolds in episodes and, close to the tip, bursts open with a rapturous confluence of strings, voices and Pratt’s piano, looking for what Prestini calls the “nice moments of self-clarity.”

It was after having a type of epiphanies himself that Pratt created his multimedia venture Black in America, solid from the isolation of the pandemic and unrest over the homicide of George Floyd. He is introduced the presentation to school music colleges throughout the nation, weaving photographs from the civil rights motion and his personal experiences with racial profiling into the performances. One other piece Pratt has been touring lately lies on the heart of the brand new album — it is a solo piano work by the Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks that illuminates the mysterious threshold the place, in Eliot’s poem, “previous and future are gathered.” Impressed by Teresa of Ávila, a sixteenth century nun, the piece reveals a form of supercharged nonetheless level between non secular and mental ecstasy. Pratt makes the music burn, each in its tranquil and agitated states.

Like Vasks, Alvin Singleton is an elder statesman. Now 82, the American composer as soon as marveled on the younger Pratt’s prowess, hoping someday to listen to the pianist play his music. Singleton’s Time Previous, Time Future toys with the elasticity of time — and kinds of music. Jagged piano chords would possibly recall both Thelonius Monk or Igor Stravinsky, whereas the two-voiced counterpoint reaches for Bach.

What attracted Pratt to Eliot’s verse, he says, is “an acknowledgement of the inexpressible — that which can’t be tidily communicated.” The ultimate work on the album, by Judd Greenstein, appears to seek for that ambiguous place. Nonetheless Level, one other pint-sized piano concerto, is constructed from two chords that engender a large shade palette of emotion, alternating turbulent outbursts with quieter rippling passages and retro, pulsating voices straight out of Steve Reich‘s Music for 18 Musicians. In its closing second, Pratt is alone, proper hand reaching for the very best observe.

With this new album, maybe Pratt has rediscovered the candy spot he as soon as loved within the recording studio. STILLPOINT gives a lot to wrestle with – six distinct new items that, every in their very own approach, attempt to train us how one can stability contradictions in our lives, to search out the nonetheless level. That makes for one endlessly partaking recording. Let’s hope we do not have to attend 12 years for the following one.