Lenny Marcus – Distant Dream – self-produced

by | Jun 25, 2012 | Jazz CD Reviews

Lenny Marcus – Distant Dream – self-produced LJM 020, 68:05 ***:
(Lenny Marcus – grand piano, flute, bass flute, synthesizers; Rick Eckberg – upright bass, electric bass; Larry Scott – drums; Tom Artwick – sax, flute; Cyrus Pace – acoustic & electric guitars; Vladimir Espinosa – congas, percussion; Scott Walter – trumpet, flugelhorn)
Lenny Marcus is a musical enigma. He has loads of talent that he prodigiously displays in the right setting such as his previous disc, Sun Ray, A Tribute to Ray Bryant, and which was favorably reviewed here recently. Yet in this release entitled Distant Dream, he can’t seem to make up his mind where he is musically, and thus we are left with an ambiguous result.
Apart from the Johnny Mandel tune “Suicide Is Painless”, the other fifteen tracks are Marcus’ original compositions which carry various levels of interest. But let’s begin with the Mandel piece. It leads off at a fine moderate tempo, then slides into a semi-Latin beat with some excellent two hand touches, and has a couple of dazzling runs. All in all it seizes the listener’s imagination. As for his own compositions, Marcus enters the action with “Seven Ate Nine” done in a funky/bugaloo time signature with the accomplishment uncertain. The following track “Distant Dream” is the title tune and has some oblique Brahms’s Lullaby references at the beginning but fails to take off.
On “Groove’s Bag” which is a riff on the Milt Jackson composition “Bag’s Groove”, we get a more playful Marcus but where is the jazz styling? That perhaps is symptomatic of the entire album. Expectations unfulfilled. In today’s jazz piano world, one could draw up a list of pianists who stylistically are interchangeable and could conceivably replace each other on any given gig if required. The challenge is to find the kernel of uniqueness or an unusual approach to draws-in the listener.
Neither of those items is present on any of the compositions that fill out the balance of the disc. There are some nice moments on some of the pieces such as “This Is Not Goodbye” and “For My Friend” which Marcus wrote for his former piano teacher and mentor Ray Bryant as well as the closer “Ode To The Night”.
The back cover of the disc recommends that it be filed under Jazz. If so I would put a question mark after it.
TrackList: Seven Ate Nine; Distant Dream; Five Little Stars; Groove’s Bag; Have A Heart; Thoughtful Blues; Mona’s Tune; Song For Cyrus; My Ocean Of Dreams; This Is Not Goodbye; Suicide Is Painless; Gotta Wake Up Happy; Waltz For The Ages; Happy Blues For Two; For My Friend; Ode To The Night
—Pierre Giroux

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