Alan Broadbent Trio‘Like Minds’ (Savant Records)“This I Dig of You,” the opening of pianist Alan Broadbent’s new album, “Like Minds,” makes me think about optical illusions, particularly of the sort where you see two images at the same time. Say, you’re viewing what seems to be a vase, yet from another angle you see it’s also a pair of human faces in profile.This sort of thing isn’t exactly rare in jazz, where so many tunes are essentially echoes of earlier songs, but few performers on any instrument have the ability to make you hear two tunes at once and make them both sound beautiful. That’s what Alan Broadbent does on “This I Dig of You,” which also served as his opening number for the album launch event at Birdland last month. The tune was written by tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley for his classic 1960 quartet album “Soul Station,” and even though I’ve heard the Mobley number many times — from that album and dozens of subsequent versions — I somehow never quite noticed that it is based on “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm.” That 1937 movie song by Bronisław Kaper, a Jewish refugee composer who settled in Hollywood (a parallel to Kurt Weill, whose wonderful “This is New” is also heard here), is far less well known than his later “Green Dolphin Street.” The title derives from a key line in the traditional African American spiritual “Going to Shout All Over God’s Heaven.” “God’s Chillun” was introduced by the unlikely team of Ivie Anderson and Harpo Marx in “A Day at the Races,” and even though the depiction of Black characters is hardly what one would called enlightened, the song became a favorite of jazz musicians, both in its original form and in other variations, such as “Little Willie Leaps” by Miles Davis.Mr. Broadbent’s opening melody statement of “This I Dig” is warm and engaging, as is his improvisation. Then, as is appropriate for any song about someone having “got rhythm,” there follows a solo by bassist Harvie S. and a very lively trade with drummer Billy Mintz. The tutti, when Mr. Broadbent re-enters with the “Dig” melody, is the highlight of the track if not the album; your heart goes dancing to two songs at once. It’s the musical equivalent of a swirl cone of soft ice cream, with chocolate on one side and vanilla on the other.In addition to Mr. Broadbent having a new album, the best news is that his trio with Messrs. S. (he of the rakish beret) and Mintz is outstanding and that he now has an ongoing recording situation. Mr. Broadbent is one of the more remarkable pianists, composers, arrangers, bandleaders, accompanists, and, overall, musical storytellers of our time, yet he’s always been under-recorded in his own projects. Indeed, the elves and the inchworms who run Wikipedia don’t list any new releases for him since 2016, but he has at least five in the last three years or so. There are two special projects on European labels (including a Dave Brubeck songbook that I’ve got to get my hands on) and three for Savant Records: “New York Notes” (2019), “Trio in Motion” (2020) and “Like Minds” (recorded in 2021 and recentlly released). The pandemic has somehow proven to be a boom moment for Mr. Broadbent, and we are all the lucky beneficiaries.The New Zealand-born and -raised pianist has a remarkable touch, at once light and full of purpose, and though we tend to classify him amongst the sublimely lyrical players inspired by Bill Evans, there’s just as much Bud Powell in him, as he shows with “Blue Pearl.” His repertoire choices reveal an astute knowledge of what we collectively refer to as “the songbook.” You don’t get to hear the swing era art song, “With the Wind and the Rain in Your Hair,” very often, and the same holds true “Dance Only With Me,” an overlooked waltz by Jule Styne from “Say Darling,” a show that wasn’t quite a musical and also not quite a hit. Mr. Broadbent plays the first with more uptempo aggression than the way the composers might have intended, and makes the second even more romantic.There are other songbook standards, such as a rapturous, celestial “Stairway to the Stars” and “This is New,” as well as jazz classics, like Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” and Sonny Rollins’s “Airegin.” There’s also a lovely pastoral ode by Mr. Broadbent titled “Prelude to Peace.” (He performed a few more originals at Birdland.) Here’s hoping that the current trio continues to be so productive as to release a new album every year at least. When he played the coda of “Dance Only With Me,” I couldn’t help but hear the words of Betty Comden and Adolph Green in my ear, particularly the last lines, “Dance only with me / Till all our sweet music is gone.” At 75, Alan Broadbent still has a lot of sweet music left in him.
