Insiders are always hearing Art Tatum’s legacy in the sound of Oscar Peterson, or Bill Evans’s in Keith Jarrett – but the journey of Ran Blake, the now 80-year-old pianist, composer, educator and theorist, is harder to track. Blake grew up devoted to jazz, gospel music, Bartók, Debussy and film noir, became a key figure in the jazz/classical Third Stream movement, and has been making his own perceptively independent music ever since. Film noir and the French new-wave director Claude Chabrol fuel this album of flinty, eerie or austerely romantic short pieces, with Ricky Ford on occasional sax, and one operatically ghostly vocal. The wistful Cemetery is a typical Blake blend of delicate treble sketches and and hard-clanged chords, Bells of Doom and The Nights of Tremolat are among several spooky tracks referencing Chabrol composer Pierre Janssen. Ford mixes purrs and atonal smears on a wild account of Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge, is smoky and then squalling over Blake’s blithe departures on Max Roach’s Garvey’s Ghost. It’s unmistakeably jazz, but of a robustly non-generic character.
