Songs of Earth

It takes guts to walk out onstage with nothing but a piano, your imagination and trust that you can bring the two together in fruitful combination. On Songs Of Earth, Jessica Williams takes up this challenge, which was recorded live over several nights at the Triple Door in Seattle. The album overall cases a mood of somewhat sad reflection. Minor keys predominate. Certain technical devices crop up again and again--tremolo octaves in the left hand, a sus-four lick that scampers quickly toward the top of the keys. But the more engaged you get with Williams' improvisations, the more problematic the experience becomes.

In her liner notes, Williams describes "Poem" as "one piece that I actually notated." She also came up "very sketchily" with "Little Angel" and devotes the one non-original track on Songs Of Earth to John Coltrane's "To Be." It's interesting, then, that " Poem" and "To Be" especially come across as very extemporaneous. "Poem" is anchored on a 3/4 left-hand minor ostinato, which Williams plays kind of mournfully.

"To Be" feels invented on the spot. Williams encourages the impression by starting with a left-hand drone and modal scatterings in the right hand, both of which she uses liberally on the other tracks. We settle into a triplet left-hand ostinato and an increasingly minor-key feel. There are a few majors here and there, but the entire 10-minute performance is colored by the inevitability of a switch to the minor. An unexpected major five-and-a-half minutes in leads to a more complex tapestry of expression.

Despite its ambitious length, "To Be" exposes the same range of expression Williams employs throughout Songs Of Earth. She does sometimes add extra flavoring, most noticeably on "Montoya." Yet she also mirrors much of what she does elsewhere through liberal rubato, another left-hand octave tremolo. Even her appropriation of modal elements identified with Spanish music harks to "The Enchanted Loom," where the device feels almost self-consciously applied.