Let’s get this out of the way first: Rick Cutler tours as Liza Minelli’s drummer! I don’t know what to do with that piece of information. He has provided us with a CD filled with solo piano music. First thing you see when you open it up is a quote by Maharishi Mehesh Yogi. Now this might not mean anything to people nowadays, but those of us who lived through the 60s will remember the Maharishi as the little Indian gent who took the Beatles to India for a course in Transcendental Meditation. “Time is a conception to measure eternity.” Yep, that sounds like him. Remember John Lennon writing “Time is a concept by which we measure our pain”? Time is a lot of things to a lot of people. When you’re listening to a CD, it can be almost 80 minutes.
Let’s get back to the music at hand. Rick Cutler studied with Chick Corea, he has composed themes for TV shows, and played behind or with Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, Harry Connick Jr., Donna Summer, Charles Aznavour and Richie Stott (of the Plasmatics). Donna Summer and The Plasmatics? Wow!
We’re told that he composed this music by sitting at the piano and improvising until he came up with themes he liked and then recorded them on acoustic piano. He says, “At the recording session I ended up playing one tune twice as slow as I had originally envisioned just because it felt right at the moment. I gave myself the freedom to go where the music pulled me.”
It sounds like it. But Cutler doesn’t shy from taking the listener along on his explorations. His titles paint pictures that give you an idea of where he saw himself going. ”Alien Landscape” sounds like one, with the wind blowing across barren sand. “A Dance,” “Hymn” and “A Song You’ve Heard Before” are evocative studies. Some of the pieces are related specifically to individual . . . influences, “Debussy,” “Noise (for Tony Williams),” “Thank You (for McCoy Tyner),” and “Song for Noel.”
There is a sense of new age about the album, whatever that means these days, as well as echoes of modern classical composition combined with the freedom of improvisational jazz. This is music that really doesn’t fit one label. It is music to measure our openness to music itself. To the mathematics and emotion that music combines. First Melancholy, Then the Night Stretch, then we awake to creation.
(New Dude Records, 2011)
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