Aaron Diehl Trio plays the Velvet Note in Alpharetta, GA

Aaron Diehl, Paul Sikivie and Lawrence Feathers at the Velvet Note

If you bother to take the thirty-minute drive from downtown Atlanta or Decatur to a strip mall in Alpharetta you will be amply rewarded for your efforts. Located in a twenty-foot storefront at 4075 Old Milton Parkway, two doors from a barber shop, is perhaps the best jazz club in the greater Atlanta area.

The Velvet Note, Acoustic Living Room,  Alpharetta, GA

The Velvet Note was a wild dream of a club that started in 2011 with the notion that if you provide people with an intimate space, build into the space top quality acoustics, and feature the crème de la crème of jazz artists, people will come to hear the music. That music would be jazz in all its wonderful diversity. The idea of a successful jazz club seems to be an oxymoron, but manager Tamara Fuller has somehow seemed to make the concept work and work with style.

On Saturday March 26,2016 the featured artist was the great young piano phenom Aaron Diehl and his trio. The band featured Lawrence Feathers on drums and Paul Sikivie on upright bass. In speaking to Mr.  Feathers after the first set he told me the band has been together for about five years. As with any fine piano trio the symbiotic relationship between the three players is a must and this trio had no shortage of symbiosis, often stopping and starting magically like finely choreographed dancers in precise synchronization.

The first set started with the Benny Carter standard “When Lights Are Low.” Mr. Diehl is a dashing young man who almost looks like he could be a model for Armani suits. His playing is as elegant as his haberdashery and his bandmates were equally outfitted in suits and ties. Mr. Diehl is one of those players who, when he sits down at the keyboard, you know takes his art very seriously. He has beautiful facility with both hands which he displayed with unpretentious artifice. His touch can be as light as the most ruminative Bill Evans or as stride-full as Willie “The Lion” Smith. Mr. Sikivie’s plucky bass solo was a nice contrasting voice to Diehl’s thoughtful comping. Diehl also employed repeated two-handed block chord progressions that were very effective.

Aaron Diehl's Space Time Continuum Mack 1094

On his imagistic original “The Flux Capacitor,” from his latest album, Space Time Continuum, Diehl and company quicken the pace and supercharge the audience into the musical time warp. A representation of the excitement and fantastical delight of the Robert Zemekis Sci-fi Comedy Back to the Future from 1985. Diehl’s syncopated left hand creates a memorable ostinato against his probing right hand explorations. Sikivie and Feathers shuffle along at De Loren cruising speed. Mr. Feathers keeping the rapid pace with his ride cymbal, snare and fluttering hi-hat.

Back to the Future Promo Poster

An ardent student of the history of the music, what better way than to show us his own twenty-first century way of re-imagining Fats Waller’s 1942 composition “The Jitterbug Waltz.” Even those in the audience who didn’t know the name of the tune recognized the music’s sauntering melody. Diehl used the piece to produce beautifully flowing glissandi, maddeningly precise repeated motifs showcasing pianistic mastery that was a treat to behold. The trio performed as an organic whole as Diehl expanded on his improvisations around the core of the melody with ever more adventurous expansions. Diehl also used dynamics to great effect as he went form loud and tumultuous to soft and gentle and his whim dictated.  Mr. Sikivie played a particularly welcomed bass solo.

The gentle “Spring Can Really Hang You Up,” made famous by Ella Fitzgerald, was played as sensitive, almost reverential ballad. It is fascinating to watch Mr.  Diehl up close as he plays a ballad like this. His hands are so long and slender and he often settles them tentatively over the keys in anticipation of his next idea or chord, but in a way that makes you feel he himself is not sure where they may land next.He often has his head bowed and his eyes closed as he seems to be channeling the meaning of the song through its unspoken lyrics. A wonderfully evocative rendition.

Diehl and company played another of his originals “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” which he says was inspired by a painting by Mondrian. The song featured some nice solo trap work by Lawrence Feathers who leads the group into a bebop burner. Diehl seems comfortable with a myriad of styles from bebop to stride, hard bop to crossover.

Piet Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie Woogie"  1943

As if to demonstrate the breadth of the pianistic tradition, the group rolled right into Thelonious Monk’s staccato “Green Chimneys” and then onto Bud Powell’s frenzied “Un Poco Loco” both performed with astounding proficiency. Leathers stick and rim work on “Green Chimneys” was particularly impressive. This group can really run on high octane, pushed by Diehl’s fleet fingers, Sikivie’s relentlessly walking bass lines and Feathers subtle but driving trap work.

Diehl chose a song from the underrated pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet fame, “Milano” to do his only solo piece of the first set.  This almost classically inspired piece of music is a miniature masterpiece of shimmering beauty. Diehl played the song at first with a sensitivity that Lewis would have admired, then broke into a stride-like saunter altering the mood from moody to magical.

The trio ended the set with a modal blues driven medley, sprinkled with tidbits of many famous jazz standards throughout which they played to a bustling ovation. Clearly Aaron Diehl is, as one patron put it “the real Diehl,” an elite pianist in a crowded field.  He has mastered a myriad of styles and has an abundance of ability. At age thirty we can look forward to a long and rewarding career from this excellent pianist.

An Intimate Evening of Solo Piano with Jason Moran at the Carnegie Room of the Nyack Library Friday June 15, 2012

Jason Moran

Within the confines of the elegantly appointed Carnegie Room at the Nyack Library, a full house made up of the curious and the cognoscenti, came to listen and feel the music of a modern pianistic virtuoso by the name of Jason Moran.

The library was originally formed in 1879, but in 1901 the trustees of the library petitioned the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie for funds to build a new building and with his donation of fifteen thousand dollars the new library was completed four years later and opened in January of 1904.

Andrew Carnegie

With the beaming bearded portrait of the wry Scotsman Carnegie, watching over the room, the space is a welcoming place to both perform and

enjoy the music

On this special evening the pianist Jason Moran mesmerized the packed house with his joyful countenance, his respect for the tradition and his marvelous technique.

Moran is a deserving recipient of the prestigious MacArthur fellowship in 2010, often referred to as the genius award. He was given this award 
“…for blending a variety of musical styles in genre-crossing performances that expand the boundaries of jazz expression.”

James P. Johnson

On this evening Mr. Moran immediately disarmed and connected with his audience as he approached the piano and humorously talked about how different artists first approach their instrument. He started with a return to the history of jazz piano with a piece by the stride pianist James P. Johnson tellingly titled “You Got to be Modernistic.” On the lengthy intro, Mr. Moran created waves of sound with his amazingly disciplined left hand as his right hand darted and weaved across the keyboard in a dazzling display of precisely controlled dynamics. When he got to the stride section of the piece, he had the audience bouncing their heads to his rhythmic creations. His deft fusion of modernistic elements with the classic and joyful aspects of the tradition makes him a true innovator who expands the musical dialogue.

As is his practice, Mr. Moran likes to interact with his audience in a way that breaks down the barriers often artificially created between the artist and the listener. To his credit he does so with the ease of a polished performer. He read aloud a particularly poignant piece from the ending of a book titled 

“The Confessions of Nat Turner”. Mr.Turner was a black slave insurrectionist who led an uprising of slaves against their oppressors in Virginia in 1831. Mr. Moran’s reading of the telling last words of the soon to be executed Mr. Turner, added a touching element of theater to the proceedings. Appropriately the music he composed to accompany the reading had a distinctively Americana flavor. It could have easily been composed as a soundtrack to a Ken Burns period piece summoning visions of sepia toned Mathew Brady daguerreotypes. Mr. Moran creates these aural portraits with his music and it is a wonder to behold.

Thomas Wright"Fats" Waller

Mr. Moran recently performed the music of pianist Fats Waller in Chicago. As he said in a recent Chicago Tribune article “Fats, with those rolling eyes…people to a degree may have viewed him as a ‘sambo’ figure, a vestige of this vaudeville era… But he moved things so much further.”

It is this thoughtful evaluation of the history and the culling of the jewels within it, that makes Mr. Moran’s work so interesting and important. 


On Waller’s “The Shiek of Araby” we hear the playful, deceptively simple sounds of the speakeasy, but with touches of funk sprinkled in for good measure.  Moran's rendering of the Waller classic “Ain’t Misbehaving” transports the audience to a familiar era of light, uplifting music, but not to be dismissed as unimportant or simple. As he lulls you into this repertoire of familiar songs you are treated to the workings of a marvelously gifted technician who judiciously uses his virtuosity only as a tool never for pyrotechnic display.

Mr .Moran has a special affinity to the pianist Jaki Byard, a mentor who taught  the young pianist when he first came to New York to study piano from his native Houston. Mr. Byard’s legacy lives on as Mr. Moran played the obscure“To Bob Vatel Of Paris” with his Art Tatum-like runs that were incredible in their precision and accuracy.

 Jaki Byard

Moran's soulful rendering of the classic 

“Body And Soul” was played with a Jarrett-like repeating rhythmic motif that instantly modernized the familiar tune.

Mr.Moran closed the evening’s performance with an original composition titled 
“ He puts on his Coat and Leaves,” a study in the skillful use of dynamics, as he builds on a ostinato rhythm and counters it with a pretty melody, creating tremendous tension that he slowly releases to a satisfying conclusion. 


I look forward to following Mr. Moran as he ventures to expand his musical palette and prevent the music we call jazz from becoming increasingly more esoteric. Creating serious music that has  wider appeal  without rendering it into pop pablum is a worthy goal and one that Mr. Moran is well equipped to achieve.

The Rockland County Jazz and Blues Society under the astute guidance of the pianist Richard Sussman and the Carnegie Room Concert Series Artistic Director Yashar Yalowitz should be applauded for bringing such world class music to Rockland County.

To be able to see such high quality performances from the likes of Mr. Moran, or past performances by Mr.Vjay Iyer and upcoming performances by Mr.Steve Kuhn and Mr.Hal Galper, in the intimate setting of the Carnegie Room is perhaps one of the best-kept secrets of the metropolitan area’s jazz scene.




Here is Jason with his trio of Taurus Mateen on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums  playing his "He puts on his coat and leaves"