Sullivan Fortner Trio
Blues Alley
Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025
Throughout the second set of Sullivan Fortner’s recent appearance at Blues Alley, the one word that kept returning to me was “inventive.” The New Orleans-born pianist has been one of the most consistent voices in the “straight-ahead” idiom for well over a decade. Though he first came to wider attention after winning the Cole Porter Fellowship of the American Pianists Association in 2015, many followers of the music would have already borne witness to his anchoring of the piano chair in the Roy Hargrove Quintet for several years prior. By now, Fortner has released several projects as a leader, as well as performing alongside many other jazz stars, including Cecile McLorin Salvant. Akin to Salvant’s penchant for reaching deep inside the history of music, his most recent records as leader, Moments Preserved (2018) and Solo Game (2023), demonstrate an eclectic repertorial palette, which can easily dip — with equal verve and seriousness — into the classical and operatic, the new and old jazz standard, and the fun and zany.
That energy was on display on Jan. 14 at Blues Alley, where Fortner appeared as part of its Tuesday piano trio series. Joined by bassist Yasushi Nakamura and drummer Kayvon Gordon, the pianist offered concertgoers a program of music that made straight-ahead music a space of invention rather than conservatism.
As the band found its way to the stage at the start of the second set, an audience member surprised Fortner by holding up the February 2025 issue of DownBeat, with its cover story on Fortner’s forthcoming Southern Nights. He appeared wont to downplay the honor. “Now you’ve made me nervous,” Fortner told the fan, belying the clear confidence evident in his maneuvering of what he calls a “box of wood” (or, in layperson’s terms, a piano).
Over the course of the next hour and 10 minutes, the trio was able to compress nine tunes into one set without any of them feeling rushed. It was as if Fortner was mirroring the days when recording engineers — amid technical limitations — had to place restrictions on the kinds of improvisational stretching that was standard live. But here, there were no creative limits. And much stretching, though it was quite subtle. A standard that would have clocked in at around three or four minutes in older recordings sometimes stretched to seven or eight in Fortner’s set, but it never felt as if we had been there that long. The only reason anyone might have been conscious of the time at all was because of how easily this full program of music fit within the confines of a club setting. It is evident that the styles of play that had to change to accommodate the technology are for Fortner grounds for creative interventions—a point about the significance of the material record that is made well in Fumi Okij’s brilliant Jazz as Critique.
Responding to this tradition, one itself renewed and transformed by the requirements of the studio, is a challenge all subsequent players find themselves faced with.
The set began with Gordon introducing drummer Lawrence Williams’s composition “No. 3.” In the first solo of the night, Fortner started a fire that burned for the next four selections, including a rendition of Benny Golson’s “Stablemates” and an arrangement of “Lover Come Back To Me” befitting Bud Powell, the seminal piano figure that Fortner cited as one of his guides. The setlist found the band effortlessly discovering much space for reimagining as well as staking claims to these well-known pieces. Perhaps the typical jazz aficionado would have been on comfortable grounds thus far, content to march down this path with the trio.
But then it would not have been a Sullivan Fortner set.
The music that has been complicatedly framed as straight-ahead is never so straight.
As he moved through recognizable tunes — only breaking for applause during the shifts — those who know, knew that there was going to be a curveball at some point. It came in the form of the next composition, Gabriel Fauré’s “Au Bord De L’eau,” beginning with a piano introduction that felt as if was going to morph into the welcome relief of a ballad. But soon we realized we were in a different territory entirely. The piece had a waltz-like feel that allowed the band to explore a vast terrain of moods, especially as they dug their way deeper into the composition. This opened the door for different kinds of improvisatory moments that matched well with the arrangement and trajectory of the larger set. For followers of Fortner (and Salvant, for that matter), such departures are both familiar and never dull.
After a brief statement from Fortner, the band quickly moved into a special tribute to Hargrove, with whom Fortner visited Blues Alley annually during the years he played in the late trumpeter’s band. Though it was not the last song, “Never Let Me Go” — an old jazz standard that Fortner said he remembers playing with Hargrove, sometimes twice a night – was easily the peak of the set.
Introducing it alone, Fortner positioned the sublime echo of the ballad’s chorus to move us after each go ‘round. It is hard not to read too much into the moment. Hargrove’s weeklong residencies at Blues Alley stretched back decades, and by the time Fortner joined the band those dates had become what he characterized as a “school.” To return here to a tune like this, with a title that evokes holding on to someone, was perhaps Fortner’s way of reaching closer to the memory of a musician so important to him — and to the rest of us.
Yet for all of the emotion of that moment, the trio raised the meter again with two more tunes, before concluding with a rendition of saxophonist Kenny Garrett’s iconic “Sing a Song of a Song,” introduced by Nakamura. Somehow figuring out how to interpolate the theme of Cheers, an excerpt from Return to Forever’s “Romantic Warrior,” and a half-dozen other subliminally familiar themes, Fortner refused to play it straight. And that might have been the theme of the night. The music that has been complicatedly framed as straight-ahead is never so straight. The challenge remains getting some folk to understand that.
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