RUST: A Homage to the Crescent City by Pianist/Composer Amaury Faye and his NOLA Quartet

 

Amaury Faye and his NOLA Quartet-RUST

The French pianist Amaury Faye is new to me. His latest music, the album released November 15, 2025 RUST, is a robust revelation. I have to thank the persistence and good taste of his publicist Matt Merewitz, for turning me onto this one. When I saw drum master Herlin Riley on the credits, that was one more positive indication to me that Faye's music might offer some welcome surprises and I was not disappointed. 

This thirty-five year old pianist comes out of Paris. Faye has a long list of achievements in the European musical world. He has been a member of the Vogue Trio where he lent his pianistic skills to the group led by Belgian double bassist Giuseppe Millaci from 2016 through 2023. The group is known for modern jazz that incorporates a European elegance and rhythmic variation. Faye has also played with the well-respected twelve-member French collective Iniative H led by saxophonist David Haudrechy.

Faye's history as a potent sideman has not stopped the pianist from finding his own voice as a pianist/leader. In  2010, he released My Big Toe with Louis Navarro on bass and Pierre Ardré,  which was a live recording based on music inspired by pianists Kenny Barron, Oscar Peterson and Hank Jones. In 2016, Faye came to the US to study at Berklee, in Boston, with Joanne Brackeen, and in March 2015, he was awarded Berklee's Jazz Performance Award for best jazz pianist of that year. In 2019, Faye released his first solo album Buran, a grand and introspective eight-piece suite that was inspired by his parent's work in the space industry. Bursan means snowstorm in Russian. It is inspired by Faye's respect for Russian music, culture and the beauty of Siberia's vast expanse and incorporates elements that combine classical, cinema, pop and jazz music.

(left to right clock wise) Amaury Faye, Herlin Riley, Julian Lee and Amina Scott  

With so many diverse influences, Amaury is never one whose musical offerings can be pigeonholed into a particular genre. On his latest release RUST,  Faye is joined by a dynamic group of musicians who add to the possibilities in the pianist's color palette. Besides Faye's facile piano work , he creates catchy, cinematic compositions which lend to creative, lively improvisation by his bandmates. Bassist Amina Scott offers plucky, booming lines that swell the beat organically and with vitality. Tenor saxophonist Julian Lee plays with a searing confidence. A fiery player whose  sax elevates this music. Trap master Herlin Riley adds  that secret sauce factor to the album. The soul and Afro-Caribbean rhythm variations that breathe New Orleans life into this offering.

The opener, "Sirens of the Crescent City," finds Lee's saxophone recreating the urgency of a siren-like plea over Faye's ostinato piano lines. Besides the images created by the music, there is a jagged line here that is punctuated by Scott's booming bass and Riley's simmering drum and cymbal work. Lee's saxophone builds the urgency like an overflowing pot of boiling water. The music aurally captures the frenetic energy of an unexpected emergency mode that a visitor to any big city might experience.

"Walkin' Down the Levee" captures a funky, sauntering musical strut down to New Orleans famous Levee. The Levee, over one hundred feet long and at times finding embankments of over sixteen feet in height, offer New Orleans a lifeline. It allows this unique city to exist below sea level. But the Levee is also a liability. The dual personality of the structure showed its dangerous side when in 2005 Hurricane Katrina ran havoc, overflowing the levees and yielding massive destruction. That being said, Faye's take on walking down at the Levee is more of a soulful, funky ode to the vitality and spirit that he has experienced there. Faye sets the tone with a slinky, captivating shuffle that opens with a syncopated drum entre by Riley and  features Lee's husky tenor stating the repeating lines of the melody, supported by Scott's pulsing bass and Faye's supportive descending piano lines. Lee's tenor work builds tension and excitement with an aplomb that  remind me a bit of Michael Brecker. Faye's piano solo is inventive with a graceful elegance that carries you along. You find yourself rocking your head back and forth to the infectious beat he, along with Scott and Riley, create. If you're like me, this one is on your repeat play list for a while.

"The Railyard," part of Faye's cinematic-like portrait of New Orleans, finds the pianist using the propulsive rhythm of the team of Scott and Riley to create an aural image of constant motion. The team play brilliantly, all four locked into a repeating syncopated synchrony. The music offers solos- first by Faye whose playing hovers in a soup of sounds that have elements of pop, classical and jazz, similarly to the way Brad Mehldau amalgamates and blurs these styles. Lee's tenor follows with his own clarion bursts and the song ends with Riley's roiling drum work finishing with authority to the coda.

"Huckabuck Garden" opens with Faye, Scott and Riley having a rollicking conversation. This has a low down, Honky-tonk, NOLA feel to it. The title refers to a sweet, fruit or sugar flavored homemade frozen desert -a huckabuck-popular in New Orleans and parts of the Louisiana and Georgia. 

The album continues with a ragtime inspired tune "Public Belt Rag." As the pianist Jelly Roll Morton was one of the first to incorporate ragtime time with improvisation, this one could easily be a homage to this inventive style. Faye once again proves just how diverse his musical education and abilities are. Pure fun.

The boogie-woogie blues is on display on "The Barges Blues." Faye's piano work  follows in the steps of early innovators of this style like James Booker, Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons. Faye's pianistic style here, like mush of what he does, always has a certain elegance to it. The quartet all have fun with this one and it has a spirit that puts a smile on your face.

The title cut "Rust" opens with an repeating rhythmic phrase that creates a signature, a theme to the song. Faye's piano lines set the scene, Scott and Riley add the rhythmic counterpoint and Lee's saxophone play a serpentine line over the riff. Rust is a pervading, often a never-ceasing deterioration that is usually associated with aging metal. For old cities like New Orleans, infrastructure like bridges and railroad tracks have their share of rusting. As the cover photo of the album reveals, Faye seems to have witnessed this ongoing fight to keep valuable structures from rusting away and ultimately failing. As an artist, Faye's music is raising awareness of these issues, as well as celebrating the area's celebratory musical feel and I applaud that effort. 

"The Old Empress in the Gloaming" is a very telling title to this haunting ballad. Faye has a poetic flair here. While its hard to know his intention, the title refers to the fading grandeur of an old royal lady. "In the gloaming" refers to in the twilight or in the dusk. The music evokes mystery, a little melancholy and reflection. The music seems to have been based on Faye's experience in New Orleans. One might project that this song is the pianist finding the Crescent City, presumably the old empress, to have been through a lot (like Katrina), with its rusting infrastructure, and its once grandeur is rapidly in decline. Listen for yourself and see if that reading feels true to you.

The closing composition, "Sweet, Chaotic And Vibrant"  is a moving, classically  inspired solo piano ode, probably  to the Crescent City. Faye ends with this emotive piece and he impresses with his astute observations of what his experience has meant to him. If ever an artist revealed his love of a place, with all its warts, Amaury Faye's RUST  is a fitting and deep felt homage to New Orleans.

  

A Splendid Night of Inventive Music at 1905 Jazz Club with Andy Milne and his Unison Trio

Andy Milne, John Hébert, and Kush Abadey at 1905 Jazz Club

On Wednesday November 12, 2025, at Portland's premium jazz club 1905, the Juno award winning Canadian pianist Andy Milne brought his trio Unison in support of a tour featuring the music of his latest Sunnyside album Time Will Tell. On this West Coast tour, Milne's Unison trio included the superb bassist John Hébert, who was on the album, and the colorist drummer Kush Abadey, who ably replaced the percussion work of Clarence Penn, who was the original drummer on the album. 

Andy Milne and Unison-Time Will Tell-Sunnyside records

I first saw Milne perform as the pianist with the eclectic trumpeter Ralph Alessi's quartet when they played 1905 back in June of 2023. For those of interest you can read my review of Alessi's group performance here. After seeing the impressive Milne in action with Alessi, I made it my business to do some research and listen to more of this pianist's work.  After listening to his Juno award winning album The re Mission, a emotionally moving album that traced Milne's experience with his own personal diagnosis of cancer, his following treatment and eventually his full remission from the condition, I became an enthusiastic  fan. When Milne released Time Will Tell, his Sunnyside release from April of 2024, I had a listen and reviewed this fine album which you can read here. When I heard Milne and his trio was going to come to play in my favorite venue in my area I couldn't resist.

Hearing this group play 'live' and experience the dynamic interaction and intuitive comradery these three guys can generate while playing some of today's most modern and exciting music is like being a kid in an ice cream store. A real treat!

Part of Milne's imprimatur is his distinctive pork-pie style hat, a flat-toped felt or straw fedora that resembles a pork pie and thus the name. The artist facially reminds me a little of the actor Jeff Goldbum. 

Andy Milne at 1905 Jazz Club

The group opened the early set I attended with a composition from Milne, "Purity of Heart," which was from the latest album Time Will Tell. The album is  partially inspired by his personal search as an adopted child for his birth mother and his roots. Milne opens with a beautiful, classically influenced piano entre. The music is propelled by an syncopated, ostinato-based flow, brilliantly maintained by Hébert and Abadey. In the original album version, the music has Ingrid Laubroch's  tenor saxophone as the key foil to Milne's piano work. On this live set, the trio, and specifically, the counterpoint of Hébert's fluid bass work, was key to the  alluring interactivity. The music had its own heartbeat, an organic drive that flows like a dynamic life-force. Milne's keyboard work is emotive and inventive, lively yet melodic, tense yet beautiful. The threesome find joy and excitement in their magical bond and it shows. The audience loved it.

The second song was bassist Hébert's gorgeously reflective "Broken Landscape," which was also from the current album. Milne's piano work explores while maintaining sensitivity to the composition's intent. Beauty flows seamlessly from this man's mind to his hands. Hébert's arco work resonates with feeling through the room.  Abadey's expanded palette includes subtle colors urged by timely rim shots, deft use of sticks, brushes or hands, and using the abrasion of the surface of cymbals to great effect. His percussive ingenuity was a highlight of the evening.

John Hébert

"Kumoi Joshi" is another composition of Milne from the latest album. Milne has been intrigued by Japanese string music as played on  the Koto, a thirteen string, zither-like instrument that is plucked. This piece was played on the Koto on the album by Yoko Reikano Kimura and had some saxophone work by Laubroch.

Kumoi Joshi is translated as Cloud Scale and refers to a scale used by Koto players that is characterized by an interval structure that gives music a bright and exotic quality.  On this night, the music opened with a repeating piano line from Milne that is countered by Hébert's bass and some tom work by Abadey. Hébert's arco enters the picture where the Koto would have been played in the album. Milne's piano lines ascend and descend and seem to by following a path that has no particular destination. The trio seem to find common ground in executing this odd scale-based music.  

Milne reprised his "Drive by-The Fall" from his album The re Mission. This composition was written by the pianist as an appreciation of nature. When diagnosed with his cancer, Milne had to acknowledge the fact that sometimes nature can confront you with challenges. What Milne had to face, upon receiving his diagnosis, was like being in a drive-by accident- confusion, unbelief, despair and eventually acceptance.  The only positive way to deal with such challenges is to resolve yourself to being resolute, to embracing confidence in yourself and in your ability to rise above what is before you. The music opens with a  roiling drum solo that has a disrupting, staccato-like jaggedness to it. The piano and bass enter the ascending and descending lines that seem to emulate a person who is trying to gain their bearings after being disoriented. Abadey and Hébert create the landscape upon which Milne's piano work seems to be searching for stability. The trio brings the music to an apex of excitement before Hébert takes out his bow to beautifully punctuate the coda and then Abadey creates his own vortex of percussive excitement.

Kush Abadey

The trio gives the audience a treat with the standard, Billy Strayhorn's "Isfahan."  Milne's ability to expand on the theme with aplomb is on display. A lyrical musician of great depth, his piano sings the immediately recognizable theme. Hébert plays the foil with his astute walking that always seems to be adding some timely counterpoint ideas simultaneously. He keeps the ear from being able to  predict the next move. Hébert's pizzicato fluidity is impressive and Abadey adds his own fertile percussive ideas. These three working together is like a  testament to the making of creative music and the appreciative audience members are the grateful recipients.

Milne closes this set with McCoy Tyner's "Passion Dance" which was the opening tune from The re Mission. The repeating melodic line is identifiable and sets the stage for Milne's pianistic exploration. Hébert and Abadey maintain the initial  pace before the three move it up a level. This allows Milne's piano power to let loose in the modal mode. This trio continually urge each other on to new heights.

The set was a resounding success, even charming those in the audience who were new to Milne's music.  This is a special trio and if you can catch them before the end this tour at some of the future locations like Scottsdale, AZ or Santa Fe , NM than don't  hesitate. You will not be disappointed.