“My overall goal is trying to figure out how to connect the languages of jazz and classical to make an interesting and engaging performance, and also develop my own voice,” Aaron Diehl told me when I first wrote about him in 2010. “Why limit yourself to just playing something here and something there? It’s all gold.”
That the 37-year-old pianist has refined and expanded that statement of purpose is evident on three recent albums—as leader on The Vagabond, from 2020 (Diehl’s third for Mack Avenue), and as sideman on fellow pan-genre explorer Tyshawn Sorey’s expansively abstract-to-consonant 2022 releases Mesmerism (Yeros7) and The Off-Off Broadway Guide to Synergism (Pi). As Diehl remarked on Zoom from his Harlem apartment before listening to the 11 selections that comprise his first Before & After: “I’m interested in the jazz language as a continuum—threading together its evolution as a continual, interrelated stream of development to create a sound that’s neither old or new, but simply a landscape where we can all communicate.”
Joined on The Vagabond by bassist Paul Sikivie and drummer Greg Hutchinson, Diehl opens the recital with seven originals that refract and interrogate raw materials harvested from an expansive field of influence: a Bach-to-Ravel notion of the Euro-canon, church hymns, stride, bebop, the blues. He ends it with idiomatically apropos interpretations of repertoire by role models John Lewis and Roland Hanna, and—foreshadowing his engagement with Sorey—a frisky deconstruction of Prokofiev’s “March from Ten Pieces for Piano, Op. 12,” followed by a meditative turn through Philip Glass’ minimalist “Piano Etude No. 16.”
Diehl entered Glass’ musical world in 2014, when the composer invited him to participate in a Brooklyn Academy of Music concert
