# CD review: Armen Donelian – Fresh Start 2022 – 23: Video, CD cover

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/01/25/cd-review-armen-donelian-fresh-start-2022-23-video-cd-cover/
- Published: 2023-01-25T00:04:14+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**When the history of Jazz during the COVID-19 pandemic gets written, Armen Donelian
warrants a detailed chapter. Though he composed more than a dozen new pieces through
the spring of 2021, the veteran pianist and educator didn’t use the downtime to 
reinvent his repertoire as much as he deepened his pianistic approach and sharpened
his ears in the context of a supremely sensitive new trio with bassist Jay Anderson
and drummer Dennis Mackrel. The group’s unabashedly beautiful debut, Fresh Start,
is Donelian’s 14th album and his 11th for Sunnyside, the label that has documented
the bulk of his work as a leader since the mid-1980s.**

Like many musicians facing canceled tours and gigs, Donelian sought to push back
against the initial depression by redoubling his efforts on his instrument. Before
long he’d suffered a practice-induced shoulder injury, which led him to concentrate
on composing while he healed. When he started playing again after three months, 
Donelian continued honing his new pieces, but with a new mindset “that had nothing
to do with technique and content,” he says. “Instead of focusing on what I was playing,
I was focusing more on how I was playing, on touch, expression, and storytelling,
allowing the sound to happen in its own way. That was the main focus of this album.”

Transforming one’s sound is a major undertaking for any musician, but for an acclaimed
improviser stepping into his eighth decade it’s downright audacious. While his name
might not be as widely known as some of his contemporaries, Donelian possesses all
of the attributes, gifts, and paid dues of a heavyweight improviser, from formative
stints with Sonny Rollins, Billy Harper, Chet Baker, and Mongo Santamaria to a discography
marked by sublime and unmistakably personal projects documenting enduring relationships
and ever-evolving compositional investigations.

Taking a year-long sabbatical from teaching responsibilities at the New School during
the pandemic, Donelian solidified the Fresh Start trio, a group that renewed an 
old friendship and established a new one. Donelian and Anderson, one of the New 
York scene’s most sought-after bassists, got to know each other in the early ’80s
when they worked occasionally as a duo. Though their career paths diverged, they
reconnected about a decade ago via saxophonist Marc Mommaas, “which reminded me 
how much l liked Jay’s playing and planted an idea in the back of my mind,” Donelian
says.

Fellow piano master Jim McNeely had recommended Mackrel, whom Donelian knew by reputation
as a first-call bandmate. But their paths didn’t cross until about four years ago
when the drummer came to hear Donelian’s trio at a Hudson Valley performance. “One
of Dennis’s children was a student in the program that was sponsoring that concert
and afterwards he said, ‘Armen, I really enjoyed your playing. Anytime you want 
to play, let me know.’ I saw a door opening. So I got together with Jay and Dennis
to see if there was any chemistry between us. I loved what I heard, playing without
ego or an agenda other than beauty and sound.”

With Mackrel and Anderson bringing a good deal of bandstand and studio history to
Fresh Start, the trio’s foundation couldn’t be stronger. Since first making a mark
together on Maria Schneider’s 1994 debut album Evanescence, they’ve played hundreds
of gigs as a rhythm section tandem, including dates with pianist/arranger Russ Kassoff,
pianist Ted Rosenthal, saxophonist Steve Wilson, and many other leading players.
Their deep connection and conversational rapport are evident on every Fresh Start
track produced, arranged, and led by Donelian.

In responding to the calamity of the pandemic, the trio offers a balm in troubled
times. Healing and stimulating, it’s music that both soothes the soul and sparks
the imagination, starting with the bittersweet bossa nova “Noviembre,” a moody piece
that culminates in a taut exchange between Donelian and Anderson. The title track
is a post-bop workout with a serpentine melody that keeps snaking back on itself.
Anderson and Donelian take masterly solos while Mackrel keeps the narrative thread
spinning.

Donelian has devoted himself to teaching from the earliest stages of his career.
A proud champion of his former students, he includes two alluring pieces by rising
musicians that serve the trio well. Vatan Rajan Singh’s winsome 5/4 ballad “Ferry
Maiden” features a joyful solo by Anderson that displays his expansive lyricism.
And Sophia Bondi contributes “In the Western Night,” a vehicle for the trio to ascend,
awestruck, into a blues-drenched skyscape (an excerpt from another take of the piece,
capturing some particularly lovely blues passages by Anderson and Donelian, serves
as the album’s striking closing track).

No tune better captures the trio’s venturesome spirit than “Madagascar,” which uses
Donelian’s two-chord vamp as a magic carpet carrying them deep into modal realms.
The tension builds to a sumptuous climax, with a Mackrel passage that’s a marvel
of textural calibration. No stranger to small group recordings, Mackrel is best 
known as one of the era’s finest big band drummers. Long before he directed the 
Count Basie Orchestra (2010-2013), he’d distinguished himself via his work with 
the American Jazz Orchestra, the Carla Bley Big Band, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra,
Buck Clayton’s Swing Band, the Dizzy Gillespie All Star Big Band, and most notably
the McCoy Tyner Big Band (whose Grammy Award-winning CDs The Turning Point and Journey
feature four Mackrel arrangements).

Donelian takes the opportunity to offer a tribute to his former teacher, pianist
Richie Beirach, with a gorgeous rendition of “Gale,” a tender melody that belies
its fierce, gusty title. It’s been recorded by several other musicians, but not 
with such exquisite interplay. Harry Warren’s beseeching ballad “Never Let Me Go”
offers another master class in melodic invention. And late saxophonist Makanda Ken
McIntyre’s “Day Break,” which he recorded as a boiling up-tempo swinger on the 1976
album Open Horizon, gets reimagined as a luminous, spiritually charged ballad.

Donelian got to know McIntyre, a brilliant multi-instrumentalist, when they were
on faculty together at the New School, and he’s one of several departed masters 
whose spirit inhabits Fresh Start. The samba-powered “Tirado” is dedicated to the
late Brazilian Jazz masters, Cidinho Teixeira and Claudio Roditi. And Donelian dedicated
the buoyantly celebratory “Janet Left the Planet” to the memory of two other exceptional
musicians, vocalist Janet Lawson and bassoonist Janet Grice. The album’s biggest
surprise is Donelian’s debut as a singer on Herb Magidson and Allie Wrubel’s “I’m
Stepping Out with a Memory Tonight,” an overlooked American Songbook gem that was
recorded by Ray Eberle and the Glenn Miller Orchestra in 1939 before quickly being
forgotten. His pleasing vocals along with his formidable pianistic skills should
put the delightfully wistful tune back in circulation.

Born to Armenian parents living in New York City’s Jackson Heights neighborhood 
on December 1, 1950, Armen Hrant Donelian grew up in a household full of intellectual
ferment. His Ottoman Empire-born father Khatchik Ohannes Donelian, who lost dozens
of family members during the Armenian genocide, was a Columbia University-trained
physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. Growing up, Armen was surrounded 
by Classical and Armenian music, and from seven to 19 years old he studied piano
at the Westchester Conservatory of Music in White Plains, NY.

Jazz entered the picture for Donelian at 12, through his older brother’s clarinet
work in a Dixieland band directed by the great guitarist Arthur Ryerson Sr., a studio
ace who recorded with everyone from Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald to Charlie Parker
and Fats Waller. Ryerson’s daughter Ali, now an eminent Jazz flutist, played in 
the band along with her three brothers. Entranced by the music’s energy, Donelian
eventually joined the combo, where he learned numerous standards and more significantly
how to swing.

Following his father’s path to Columbia University in 1968, Donelian immersed himself
in music history, theory, composition, choral arrangement, and conducting, while
supporting himself with a regular gig as a lounge pianist (and as a Blues and Folk
guitarist). But his Jazz studies didn’t really commence until after graduation, 
when he fell under the sway of Beirach, a brilliantly probing improviser with a 
rarefied harmonic vocabulary who opened up a vast new musical universe for Donelian.

“But there came a point when I had to break away,” he says. “That’s a very natural
process that I often see as a teacher myself. After Richie, I focused on developing
my own sound. It was a long process of experimentation from 1980 until the mid-’
90s when I feel I really came into my own voice after investigating contemporary
Classical music more deeply, and my own Armenian roots.”

While studying with Beirach, Donelian absorbed a series of bandstand master classes
with Jazz giants, starting in 1975 with Afro-Cuban percussion legend Mongo Santamaria.
Touring internationally with the conguero’s Latin Jazz octet, he recorded four albums
on the Fania label, including the Grammy Award-nominated Sofrito, which features
three Donelian compositions.

After leaving Santamaria, Donelian immersed himself in Brazilian music, collaborating
with artists such as pianist Dom Salvador, trumpeter Claudio Roditi, saxophonist
Justo Almario, guitarist Amaury Tristão, and drummer Portinho. Freelancing around
New York, he worked with established stars like Chet Baker, Lionel Hampton, Ted 
Curson, and Ray Barretto, and rising players such as Tom Harrell, Bob Berg, Rory
Stuart, Keith Copeland, Ratzo Harris, Dennis Irwin, Jeff Williams, and Harvie S.

He reached his widest audience yet upon joining tenor titan Sonny Rollins’s band
in 1977, a thrilling yet daunting experience for the young pianist. Some years later,
tenor sax master Billy Harper hired him for a four-year run that brought Donelian
to the attention of audiences in Europe and Japan and resulted in four acclaimed
albums. “With Billy I felt that I was able to really bring in my own voice,” he 
says. “He’d take these 20-minute solos and I had to come in afterwards. Billy’s 
music is very powerful and very soulful. That was a really great time in my life.”

In the midst of his tenure in Harper’s band he made his recording debut as a leader
with 1981’s Stargazer on the Japanese label Atlas, a trio session with drummer Billy
Hart and bassist Eddie Gomez focusing on Donelian’s original compositions. He’s 
kept the format in play over the years, recording the highly regarded Trio ’87 with
Norwegians Carl Morten Iversen (bass) and Audun Kleive (drums), and 2007’s Oasis
and 2014’s Sayat-Nova: Songs of My Ancestors with bassist David Clark and drummer
George Schuller. The latter project, featuring Donelian’s arrangements of songs 
by the legendary 18th-century Armenian poet and musician Sayat-Nova, was his last
recording, and expanded on his longtime engagement with the music of his ancestral
homeland where he resided as a 2002 Fulbright Scholar. After the decade-long endeavor,
he took his time before starting his next album.

“I let the feeling develop organically,” he says. “I had all these thoughts about
what I might want to do next, lists and lists of ideas like a Leonard Bernstein 
project or an album of Richard Rodgers tunes. There’s only so much you can do. Then
the pandemic came and it was an opportunity for me to reexamine my approach to the
piano and composing. But more than that I was looking to deepen how we listen and
interact with each other in a responsive way, taking every particle of time as an
opportunity to connect with and support each other, contributing in some way to 
a more beautiful sound.”

Fresh Start came out of the pandemic, during which I had many hours of free time
in which to practice. However, I simply over-practiced and this caused an injury
to a small muscle in my right shoulder resulting in a great deal of pain. I had 
to stop playing the piano for three months and receive physical therapy in order
to allow my shoulder to heal. During this period I also sought counseling to make
sense of the frustration and anxiety I felt about this injury, but also about many
canceled gigs, the uncertainty of future employment, and many life changes that 
were occurring including retirement, the loss of loved ones and friends, and so 
on. What emerged from this process was a new approach to playing the piano, an approach
not based entirely on musical content (harmony, melody, etc.) but mostly on sound,
musical expression and storytelling. This approach is documented on Fresh Start.
Inherent in this approach is a physical aspect of playing the piano that is completely
relaxed and attentive to the sensations in my arm muscles, in order to avoid re-
injuring my shoulder. I’ve known Jay Anderson for about 40 years. We used to play
duo gigs in Greenwich Village in the 1980’s. He accomplishments and reputation were
always on my radar. We reconnected about 10 years ago in a jam session with a saxophonist
named Marc Mommaas, and it reminded me of just how much I liked Jay and his playing.
Dennis Mackrel was recommended to me many years ago by the pianist and arranger 
Jim McNeely who was my teaching colleague at William Paterson University in New 
Jersey where I taught for 23 years before I retired from my position in 2017. I 
had the good fortune to meet Dennis about four years ago when he heard me play in
a concert. We talked briefly and he offered to play with me at any anytime. Given
the high level of musicianship of both Jay and Dennis and the fact that we all live
in the same region of upstate New York called the Hudson Valley, I called a session
to play with them to see if there was any musical chemistry between us, and there
was immediate magic! We did a few small gigs together and the music felt organic.
So during my shoulder recovery in the pandemic, I decided to go out on a limb and
make a record with them,- an interview with me said **Armen Donelian**.

1. Noviembre (4:12)
 2. Fresh Start (6:23) 3. Ferry Maiden (5:52) 4. Madagascar (
6:04) 5. Gale (4:17) 6. Never Let Me Go (5:33) 7. Tirado (6:01) 8. In the Western
Night (6:13) 9. Day Break (9:03) 10. Janet Left the Planet (4:13) 11. I’m Stepping
Out with a Memory Tonight (3:04) 12. Tales In The Western Night (3:28)

**Armen Donelian (Piano)**
 **Jay Anderson (Bass)** **Dennis Mackrel (Drums)**

[**Buy from here – New CD 2023**](https://armendonelian.bandcamp.com/album/fresh-start)

![](https://i0.wp.com/f4.bcbits.com/img/a3988000590_16.jpg?resize=640%2C640&ssl=
1)

![](https://i0.wp.com/hudsonhall.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Donelianarea522021-
3530-Edit-1-e1643127763389.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

### _Related_