Ethan Iverson - The Purity of the Turf

The Guardian 80

(Criss Cross)

I heard pianist Ethan Iverson at London’s Vortex club in 2013, playing enthrallingly lateral bebop without his band the Bad Plus, and this album with former Miles Davis bass supremo Ron Carter and artful New York freebop drummer Nasheet Waits is that and then some, like a Thelonious Monk trio that’s time-travelled through hip-hop and avant-funk. Iverson’s lurchingly Monkish title track sounds like stretched and squeezed fragments of Rhythm-a-ning. Waits mixes floating snare tattoos and clipped swing into Benny Golson’s Along Came Betty, as the patient leader assembles new melody lines with trenchant invention, in solos that sound increasingly like purposeful narratives and not chord-cycles as the set progresses. Carter’s big-toned walk and slurred chords drive the bebop classic Confirmation, Iverson tenderly handles Waits’s pretty ballad Kush, the pounding Strange Serenade is the most Bad Plus-like track, and Annette Peacock’s So Hard It Hurts, a tribute to the late Paul Bley, is a dirgey, barely mobile solo-piano finale. An album of delightfully rugged character, as might be expected from the lineup.