Piano Spheres Video of Roger Kellaway Trio

Bruce Forman, John Clayton, and Roger Kellaway at the Pasadena Conservatory of Music (screen shot from the video of the performance)

This afternoon the Piano Spheres 2021 Summer Jazz Series concluded with streaming a video recording of pianist Roger Kellaway leading a trio whose other members were Bruce Forman on guitar and John Clayton on bass. The performance took place at the Pasadena Conservatory of Music; and Kellaway introduced all the selections, frequently with sly doses of wit. Presumably, the video will be uploaded to the Piano Spheres YouTube Channel in the near future.

About half of the program was devoted to Kellaway’s own compositions. Duke Ellington’s ensemble was acknowledged by one of his compositions, “Cotton Tail,” and one that Billy Strayhorn composed for the orchestra, “Take the ‘A’ Train.” The account of this latter began at a tempo so slow that the tune could barely be recognized, thus providing the foundation for one of the most inventive takes on this all-too-familiar jazz standard.

Indeed, transformation tended to be the focus on Kellaway’s approach to the music of others. The tune for Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser” was given a clear account by Forman, and Kellaway responded by inverting the entire tune. He also wove a pre-Baroque ground bass into the polyphony. In a similar vein he honored the birthday of a member of the audience with a retrograde account of “Happy Birthday to You.” Playing any piece of music backwards makes it pretty much unrecognizable, and that was certainly the case with this unconventional expression of birthday greetings.

There was a fair amount of diversity in Kellaway’s own compositions. The most interesting of these was a piano solo that was the second in a series of memorial pieces entitled Arcades. This particular selection reflected on the death of Igor Stravinsky. Ironically, it invoked a rhetoric of repetitive structures that would not have seemed out of place alongside solo piano compositions by Philip Glass. This was also a forwards-and-backwards piece, since the overall structure was ABCBA. To be fair Stravinsky himself could draw upon the rhetoric of repetitive structures, particularly in his early ballet scores; but his use of this technique was never as extreme as Glass deployed it. So this particular device may have been a more significant acknowledgement of Stravinsky’s past than many listeners may have thought.

All the other pieces involved the entire trio, and the chemistry among these three players could not have been better. Kellaway knows how to present the virtues of both jazz and “serious” music with equal admiration and attention. Hopefully, there will be future opportunities to experience the breadth of his skills.