Jazz pianist Jacky Terrasson has released his most personal album with "Mirror."
Jazz notes
In the geography of jazz, the New York-Paris axis has long been a thoroughfare for artists and ideas. From the Harlem Renaissance through the bop era, Paris offered shelter and a creative setting to African-American musicians. Although the days of Bud Powell or Dexter Gordon playing in the Latin Quarter are long gone, the City of Light remains home to more recent expatriates such as saxophonist David Murray, as well as feeding ground for a busy homegrown scene.
But perhaps no musician embodies the dual influences of Paris and New York today as does pianist Jacky Terrasson, who grew up in Paris with a French father and an African-American mother, and since 1990 has lived in New York forging a well-regarded career. On 10 albums as a leader, he's offered, among other things, complex, personal reimaginations of both American standards and classic French songs.
Tonight, Terrasson visits the Regattabar on tour behind his newest album, "Mirror," which may be his most accomplished and is certainly his most personal, as it's the first time he has recorded solo. The album is a trademark Terrasson program of the classic ("Caravan"), the unexpected (Carole King's "You've Got A Friend"), and the original, with several new compositions that evoke such personal themes as a friend's death from AIDS or Terrasson's own hybrid identity.
Reached over the Thanksgiving weekend in Easthampton, N.Y., Terrasson says of the album, "I really like hearing standards by my heroes. It's part of me, so why hide it?
"I love listening to the same tune interpreted by different musicians because it gives me a clear way to grasp their musical identity," he says. "It's kind of fair to give people the same opportunity."
That generosity pays off in the music. It's fascinating to hear Terrasson mine familiar tunes for new ideas and emotional layers that still honor the spirit, if not always the letter, of the original. His take on "Caravan," the Duke Ellington classic, is a shifting-tempo, staccato version that only reveals the melody after a minute or more. "Just A Gigolo" channels Thelonious Monk with its jaunty angularity. "America the Beautiful" opens tender and torn, and carries throughout a sense of questioning and hesitancy.
The patriotic ballad might seem an odd choice, but consider that on a previous album, "A Paris," Terrasson took the "Marseillaise," the French national anthem, and turned it into a jazz version even more shorn of the original's bombast than was Serge Gainsbourg's reggae remake. A dual citizen, Terrasson is an equal-opportunity deconstructor.
His "America" is both homage and critique: "I thought and still think that the country is not doing great," he says. "So it starts fragile, it sounds like it's tearing apart and will just break. But it ends with hope, because I'm a hopeful person."
"Mirror" takes its title for a reason: It's the reflection of Terrasson's multiple identities, and nowhere more so than in one of the originals on the record, "Tragic Mulatto Blues." The reference is to a classic literary figure, the mixed-race individual who lives in dissociation from one or both origins, vulnerable to confusion and self-loathing in a world that thrives on categories and gives power to designations.
"I was thinking back about growing up in Paris and being half-white and half-black, and the little issues that came with that," Terrasson says. "So many times I'd be asked to choose, by my friends and other people: 'Do you feel more white or more black?' "
He says he stumbled on a film in which the mixed-race protagonist cannot resolve those questions, with a sad ending: "At the end she kills herself because she couldn't find her place in the world. I could relate to this, in a small way."
But in constrast to that character, Terrasson has found a place for himself thanks to jazz, which he finds ever more international and welcoming. On trips back to Europe, for instance, he is fascinated by the classical influence on the French or Scandinavian scenes.
"When I hear all that come together, it's really hip," he says. "Not everyone might say so, some might say it doesn't swing, but I kind of like the mixture." He pauses and laughs: "But how could I not?"
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