Aaron Parks: Little Big
Ropeadope
Aaron Parks brings a refreshingly positive outlook to Little Big, the NY-based keyboardist's follow-up to his 2008 Blue Note Records debut Invisible Cinema. It's not that he's blind to what's happening in the world; it's more that through his music he aspires to represent the kind of world he imagines many would want to live in. While Parks, who enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music as a sixteen-year-old and two years later joined Terence Blanchard's band, acknowledges there's no shortage of things to get worked up about, Little Big, he says, “is not a protest record. It's not against anything; it's much more for something. What we're aiming to do is blend genres and ideas in an open and fluid way, so that structure and freedom work together to serve the larger concept of the song.” While the collection is stylistically diverse, its fourteen pieces share a desire to distill that positivity into musical form.
Though it's been eleven years since that debut, Little Big feels like a natural successor when it explores similar ground and infuses its melodic writing with elements of rock, ambient, gospel, soul, and hip-hop. It's not that Parks hasn't been busy: during the interval, he played in Kurt Rosenwinkel's band and as a member of James Farm and released the solo-piano set Arborescence and the trio date Find the Way, both on ECM. On Little Big, Parks is joined by guitarist Greg Tuohey, bassist David Ginyard, and drummer Tommy Crane, players more than up to the challenge of realizing the material's atmospheric vibe.
Tuohey propels the opening “Kid” with a funky, somewhat mysterious riff and then embellishes the cut with rhythm figures, the band locking in tightly behind him to establish early the album's emphasis on groove-based workouts. Adding to the performance's allure, Crane and Ginyard execute their parts with invention and imagination, and the leader imbues the tune with a fusion vibe by adding electric piano to the arrangement. With Parks on acoustic, “Small Planet” is as potent, not only for the sweetness of its melancholy melodies but for the slow burn of the group's build and the way the four bolster the tune's mood with texturally attuned contributions. In contrast to the intensity of “Kid,” a laidback feel pervades a number of other tracks. “The Trickster,” for instance, advances with a lazy, downtempo lope that allows one to better hear unison voicings by the guitarist and keyboardist, while the Rhodes-drenched “Aquarium” is sultriness incarnate. Any question about the calibre of Parks' jazz chops is soundly answered by the exquisite “Siren” and muscular “Rising Mind”; “Mandala,” on the other hand, is mellow in the best sense of the word.
The remaining tracks explore variations on such themes, the group showing itself repeatedly to be a groove-focused unit more intent on fashioning dramatic, well-integrated quartet performances than exploiting the tracks for individual expression. While there's no shortage of personality on display (hear, for example, how much a scalding Tuohey intensifies the fusion burn of “Digital Society”), Parks' outfit comes across like some fresh, harder-edged update of The Crusaders, Headhunters, or the like. If there's a weakness, it has to do with length: were Little Big an hour, it would feel complete; at eighty minutes, it's overlong. Still, as weaknesses go, it's a modest one that hardly argues against the quality of the group performances or the impression Parks makes as a composer, bandleader, and colourist.January 2019