“Short Stories” Told by the Bartosz Hadala Group

from the Amazon.com Web page of the album being discussed

This past April Canadian keyboardist Bartosz Hadala released his latest album, Three Short Stories. As of this writing, it appears that the album is only available for digital download from either its Amazon.com Web page or from Hadala’s own home page. Hadala is a keyboardist, alternating between an acoustic piano and the electric Rhodes piano. The Bartosz Hadala Group includes two saxophonists (Kelly Jefferson on soprano and Luis Deniz on alto), Eric St-Laurent on guitar, two bass guitarists (Brad Cheeseman and Michael Manring), percussionist Marito Marques, and, in the final (“Epilogue”) track, João Frade on accordion. All twelve tracks are original Hadala compositions.

Hadala seems to have a knack for spinning out eccentric, frequently angular, tunes. Were it not for the bass guitar, which usually carries the weight of defining and maintaining tonal center, those tunes could almost be taken as latter-day reflections on atonal practices during the twentieth century. In other words all of the players of the surface structure have the liberty to head off into terra incognita, but there is always a solid bass line in the background that will allow them to find their way back home.

Nevertheless, in the midst of all of that diversity, there tends to be a sameness of rhetoric in the delivery by all members of the Group. I find that, at the end of a hard day, one of the best ways for me to unwind is to listen attentively to elaborately adventurous jazz solos. However, most of those solos come from recordings that were released prior to the Seventies and can reach back as far as the early brewing of bebop in the wildly inventive solos of the likes of Coleman Hawkins. In that context listening to the Hadala Group tracks felt more like skimming the surface than diving deep and boldly into the previously unknown.

Mind you, these impressions come from listening to this album only twice. This would not be the first occasion in which greater familiarity leads to more adventurous discovery. For now, however, I suspect that I shall retreat back to some of my “old reliable” sources.