As had previously been the case for many American jazz musicians, in the early 1960s pianist Kenny Drew crossed the Atlantic to settle in Europe, first in Paris and later in Copenhagen.
In his younger years while attending high school he had been in saxophonist Sonny Rollins ‘ band along with saxophonist Jackie McLean and double bassist Art Taylor.
He later collaborated with Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Sonny Rollins, with whom in the 1950s together with drummer Max Roach he recorded the album Tour de Force (1956), to play at the same time with saxophonist John Coltrane on the record work Blue Train (1957) and form his own trio with bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones.
In Europe Kenny Drew finds an ideal environment to work in varied and challenging musical contexts outside the narrow circle of African-American musicians active on the U.S. jazz circuit.
Moreover, particularly in the Danish capital, the pianist has the opportunity to devote more time to musical studies while deepening his or her instrumental knowledge and skills.
An artistic path to some extent common to the American jazz figures who emigrated to Europe, ready to get involved by raising their antennae, so to speak, to take in, assimilate and make their own the aesthetic-formal tendencies of European music, anchored, even in the case of jazz, in folklore and classical tradition.
Kenny Drew’s piano style, influenced by Bud Powell, is enriched by adding to the use of block chords (locked hands) in harmonizing the melodic line(a technique used by George Shearing, Red Garland, Bill Evans and others) and to the dry phrasing inferred from the blues school, a certain taste for the lyrical abstractness of Northern European musical atmospheres.
In Denmark, the pianist established a long artistic partnership, with the recording of several duo records, with Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, a double bass player who, in the late 1960s and 1970s, carved out international visibility by collaborating with big names in U.S. jazz, in particular with pianist Oscar Peterson.
The Danish double bassist’s stylistic approach, which betrays a deep knowledge of European classical music, is enhanced by a unique technique: instead of using three fingers of the right hand, as most modern double bassists do, Ørsted Pedersen uses four, “in different pizzicato and attack techniques.”
In 1981 the Danish double bassist collaborated with Dado Moroni, a young Italian pianist who was coming into his own on the international jazz circuit in those years, to participate in the recording of the record Bluesology, with trumpeter Franco Ambrosetti and drummer Tullio De Piscopo.
In the same year Kenny Drew recorded in Milan, at Barigozzi Studios, the album Your Soft Eyes, produced by Italian music critic Giacomo Pellicciotti’s Soul Note label.
In the wake of the Danish label SteepleChase, founded by Nils Winther in 1972, with productions by jazz musicians from the American mainstream area, Dexter Gordon, Jackie McLean and others, but also by Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen himself, Soul Note, an associate of Black Saint, has been releasing records by musicians from the U.S. and Italian jazz scene since 1979.
For the recording sessions of Your Soft Eyes, Kenny Drew is accompanied by drummer Ed Thigpen, a longtime member along with double bassist Ray Brown of Oscar Peterson‘s trio, and Danish double bassist Mads Vinding, who by the age of sixteen had already been called upon to serve as a regular bassist at Jazzhus Montmartre (Cafe Montmartre), a famous Copenhagen jazz club.
Kenny Drew had worked at that same venue in the early 1960s, with Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and Danish drummer Alex Riel, in the group that served as the guest musicians’ rhythm section.
Paolo Marra
