“There is a secret emotional center in jazz which has sustained the music since it outgrew its early melodic and rhythmic gaucheries, in the late twenties. This center, a kind of aural elixir, reveals itself when an improvised phrase or an entire solo or even a complete number catches you by surprise and sends tremors up your spine. When these lyrical bursts happen in night clubs or at concerts their lovely afterimages inevitably fade. Caught on recordings, though, they last forever.
... [one] classic recorded beauty is all of the remarkable pianist Bill Charlap's "Turnaround," an Ornette Coleman blues that he fills with huge, stuttering chords and sailing-along-the-tonal-edge single-note lines (Criss Cross; 1995)."
- Whitney Balliett [paraphrase].
- Whitney Balliett [paraphrase].