The Traveler

To understand the caliber of the man, it's enough to contemplate the long list of exceptional musicians who have availed themselves of his services during his career, a career lasting some fifty years: from Chet Baker to Freddie Hubbard via Joe Henderson, Abbey Lincoln, Helen Merrill, Chico Freeman, George Benson, Yusef Lateef, Lee Konitz, James Moody or Dizzy Gillespie... Barron, like such other keyboard-legends as Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan, belongs to the aristocracy of the great jazz pianists, musicians who succeeded in taking the accompanist's art to its highest degree of finesse and distinction.

But Kenny Barron wouldn't have become the immense musician he is today if he'd been content to remain in his role as an impeccable sideman, a pianist of faultless elegance ranging over most of the styles which, from the most orthodox be-bop to post-Coltrane modal jazz not to mention sophisticated "post bop"   la Herbie Hancock , have marked the history of modern jazz these last few decades. In the company of tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, Barron founded the group Sphere, a virtuoso formation dedicated exclusively to the repertoire of Thelonious Monk; he has also enjoyed lengthy partnerships with such musicians as Ron Carter, Bobby Hutcherson, and particularly Stan Getz, whom he "seconded" in the latter's greatly moving swansong from 1987 to 1991. Over the years, Kenny Barron has asserted himself as an extraordinary catalyst for musicians of talent, precisely because he always knew how to serve those he accompanied: imperceptibly, he brought them to deliver themselves, allowing them to explore those emotional zones to which, without him, they would probably have never come close...

These rare qualities of his, inextricably mingled with empathy and soft persuasion, were perhaps never better tested than in the series of remarkable albums that have appeared on Verve under Barron's name since the mid-Nineties. Whether in a classic piano/bass/drums trio-format (with Roy Haynes & Charlie Haden, or Ben Riley & Ray Drummond), or especially more recently, in more original and sophisticated orchestral settings (cf. the delicate atmospheres he developed in his wonderful record Images in 2005), in recent years Kenny Barron has continuously added more evidence testifying to his enormous talents as a composer and arranger, establishing more strongly than ever the formal contours of a personal world that is not only firmly anchored in tradition, but has subtle audacity.

The Traveler, in this sense, merely extends and deepens the intuitions laid down by his predecessors. It is likely, however, that Kenny Barron never went as far as he does here in expressing a sort of elaborate aesthetic of understatement with a virtuosity that is paradoxical: he reaches the limits of eclipse.