Joey Calderazzo, the 37-year-old American jazz pianist, was engagingly realistic about the task he faces in committing himself to unaccompanied performance for the first time. To gather ideas, he told the audience, he had bought albums by everyone from Art Tatum to Brad Mehldau. The laconically personable New Yorker also unguardedly mentioned that his London shows would be a chance to get all the screw-ups out of the way before he records his first solo album for Branford Marsalis's new label in August.
A faintly affronted silence greeted this remark, but Calderazzo soon made it clear by his playing that he meant no disrespect. A garrulous communicator, he was simply making explicit what is regularly implied in jazz - that the audience is buying into a volatile product; and, as the ads say, the value of your investments can go down as well as up.
Calderazzo stripped away all the meditative, high-artist-at-work mystification that can sometimes cling to solo performances by, say, Keith Jarrett and presented himself more as a pianistic artisan, constantly explaining what he was doing, exhibiting quiet pride in his craft.
Just One of Those Things was played as a flow of rolling arpeggios against rising and falling left-hand feeds and, although the music built in intensity, it seemed as if the show was set to be a virtuosic but orthodox piano ballads event. Then, with his own delectable rhapsody Haiku (one of the great jazz ballads of the 1990s), he introduced disruptions to the tune's silky undulations that suggested he was going to look at all his materials from fresh angles.
A zigzagging approach to Green Dolphin Street came next, by which time Calderazzo's double-time melody playing was flying. He gleefully reintroduced Haiku to a Bill Evans-like meditation later on, played Somewhere Over the Rainbow as if he really cared about it, and even made an attempt to take on a request for his sometime boss Michael Brecker's Slings And Arrows: "How am I going to do that without the guys?" This deeply sophisticated pianist is on his way to proving that he doesn't need the guys to make lasting, personal music.
