Jeppe Zeeberg:
Eight Seemingly Unrelated Pieces of Piano Music
Barefoot Records
Jeppe Zeeberg goes his own way, something never more clearly illustrated than on his latest album, a self-produced collection whose boldness verges on iconoclastic. In keeping with the Danish pianist's declaration, “The worst crime a musician can commit is to make a boring album,” Eight Seemingly Unrelated Pieces of Piano Music is anything but. Elsewhere he describes it as a “modern take on a solo piano album, with respect for traditions and less respect for conventions,” and that too is on-point. Though other instruments (synthesizer, pipe organ, percussion) and sounds accompany the keyboards, every piece uses a specific piano improvisation or etude as the foundation; consequently, in spite of a sometimes elaborate presentation, Zeeberg still labels the album solo piano.
Whereas his earlier release The Four Seasons took time as its theme, the new one concerns space, and specifically how different environments and circumstances affect performance. Instead of recording on one piano in a single place, Zeeberg changed things up by recording pianos and keyboards (often using alternate tunings) throughout the world (Berlin, Copenhagen, Dresden, New York, Sønderho, and Tokyo). Live pieces alternate with studio recordings, and through-composed settings appear alongside improvisations. Field recording details sometimes emerge to fix a track in place (as does a title like “A Regular Guy in Japan”), with outdoors sounds of the city mingling with crowd chatter inside a performance venue.
To his credit, Zeeberg isn't without a sense of humour. Before “Overture (Departure)” plunges into its rollicking groove, for example, a calliope-styled hoot signals the trip's about to begin. Intercom announcements and other noises also surface during the rather Monkish scene-setter, which establishes an appealingly irreverent mood from the get-go. With cymbal accents and drums accenting the piano's moves, “Common Sense Was Never Common” opts for a twisted take on Baroque, Zeeberg here contributing an uptempo classical number whilst trying to keep a straight face. And at the end of “Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 99 Years Old,” a wild, at times cacophonous homage to the poet and Beat movement figure, and just before the bluesy outro “Going to Church” starts, a disc jockey dryly intones, “So that was Danish pianist Jeppe Zeeberg, and we're coming up to our final track and I think we'll have something jolly to finish off with.”
The flute-like timbres of a church organ dominate the woozy “Untitled,” Zeeberg here serving up a gently drifting meditation that provides a soothing counterpoint to the high-intensity theatrics of the subsequent piano workout “A Regular Guy in Japan.” A live performance, the tune begins as if a machine's winding up, after which the pianist embarks on a tumultuous, no-holds-barred excursion whose blues passages veer off into crushing bouts of dissonance. One imagines everything coming to a standstill during the performance, the audience collectively stunned by the spectacle. Still, as bedazzling as it and “Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 99 Years Old” are, my own taste leans towards less frazzling material such as “Home Seen From Elsewhere,” especially when plaintive folk melodies lend the lyrical ballad an affecting ache. Much like the kind of disorientation a traveler experiences in moving from one location to another, the listener is often caught off guard by the album's rapid twists, and consequently, of all the words one might use to describe the recording, monotonous is certainly not one of them.October 2018