Joel Futterman - piano

All compositions by Joel Futterman
Recorded November 5, 2019 Virginia Beach, VA
Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Benjamin Tomassetti
Each track is an unedited first take with no overdubs, and is in the order recorded.

Pianizm Futtermana zamieszkuje czasową bezczasowość, statyczność zawsze w ruchu i jej odwrotność, poza dualizmami wciąż błędnie kojarzonymi z kompozycją i improwizacją. Chociaż jego język jest natychmiast rozpoznawalny, każdy interwał iteracyjny jest zaledwie ramą dla rozległych szczytów i głębokich na kilometry dolin refleksyjności, które oświetla najbardziej satysfakcjonująca improwizacja. (fragment noty wydawniczej z okładki)

“Well, isn’t it always now?” Joel Futterman’s audible smile, in response to my simple query about the time during a phone conversation, bespeaks and accentuates the deeper truths embodied in his creativity. Grounded, sometimes adrift, forced to live in the world of duality, we capitulate too willingly to the whims and whiles of intervals, to their capricious grip on our intersecting realities, to their encapsulation of alternating mood and ebb-and-flow vitality. Doors of perception open and close in intervals. A moment, a decade, a century, these arbitrary constructs are subject to the Protean forces that bring both regeneration and decomposition. All contain the multitudes of multilayered feeling in rhythm with which Joel Futterman imbues every note and complex of his solo piano music.

Futterman’s pianism inhabits the temporal timelessness, the staticity always in motion and its inverse, beyond the dualities still mistakenly associated with composition and improvisation. While his language is immediately identifiable, each iterative interval is merely a frame for the vast peaks and miles-deep valleys of reflectivity the most satisfying improvisation illuminates. Paths of light, shade and all in-between, ways we knew only beneath the veil, are panoramically revealed, like the blues-and-gospel-tinged episodes beginning and concluding this epic opening piece. The peacefully modal vistas they expose occur and recur with the slow and secret inevitability of compassion in action, complim.......
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