Nine Rivers, by John Blum

Nine Rivers

by John Blum

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CD in digipak with liner notes by Ed Hazell

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1.	First River 04:29	buy track
2.	Second River 04:00	buy track
3.	Third River 06:24	buy track
4.	Fourth River 03:56	buy track
5.	Fifth River 08:22	buy track
6.	Sixth River 06:39	buy track
7.	Seventh River 03:35	buy track
8.	Eighth River 03:39	buy track
9.	Ninth River 06:23	buy track

about

“I don’t feel it’s necessary to explain my music.” Says John Blum, “My approach is not conceptual. It’s personal.”

So, some facts. In 2013, Blum was invited to the Crosscurrent Festival in Pescara, Italy, to perform solo with simultaneous live digital painting by artist Alice Di Carlo. (Di Carlo had done the cover art for Blum’s 2009 solo album, Who begat Eye, on Konnex.) The concert took place in a wood-paneled room with high ceilings and the lights turned off. The recording nicely captures the sound of the piano in this room that, to one extent or another, helped shape the performance.

“I was inspired by the sound of the piano as it reverberated in the room and the insulation of playing in the dark.” Blum says.

Blum’s music comes out of the jazz tradition, but is shaped by years of wide listening. Whatever echoes of other musics you might hear in his playing—Blum cites Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, McCoy Tyner. Cecil Taylor, Igor Stravinsky, and Alexander Scriabin among his many inspirations—it’s entirely, fearsomely his own.

“I don’t try to do anything. It’s more like tapping into a stream, a surrender more than an intention. I am surrendering myself to a flow state. This is where the album’s title comes from—the nine rivers are branches from the same source.”

Blum taps into some awesomely powerful currents in these nine rivers. The piano seems to unleash elemental forces. Torrent of notes bash against dark, glistening note clusters that have the presence of giant boulders, generating energy that is both beautiful and terrifying at the same time—what nineteenth century European art would call the sublime. A vast unfathomable force seems to propel the music forward. It explodes out of the instrument like the Nile River bursting through the cleft at Murchison Falls. With his mighty two-handed technique, Blum taps into a wide and deep flow of this sublime energy. His left hand probes the riverbed for punctuating chords, propulsive rhythmic patterns, and parallel dramas to unfold as his right hand lines caper at dizzying speed in ecstasy. The lively acoustics of the room cause overtones to manifest and sounds within sounds form a canopy over the cascading notes below.

Of course the foregoing description doesn’t really convey or explain the essential mystery of the music. It will always remain out of reach of words.—Ed Hazell

credits

released September 1, 2023

John Blum, piano
Photo by Peter Gannushkin

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John Blum New York, New York

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