Featured Artist: Roy Meriwether

Jazz CD cover CD Title: Live At Gilly's

Year: 2006

Record Label: American Jazz Records

Style: Straight-Ahead / Classic

Musicians:

Roy Meriwether (grand piano), Frank Smith (electric and acoustic bass), and Kenny Phelps (drums)



Review:

Roy Meriwether’s latest release Live At Gilly’s is a live recording taped at the jazz club Gilly’s in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio on September 4, 2004. The dynamic jazz pianist is in his finest form on this live album, showing the elasticity in his fingers is as swift and articulate as a youthful teenager's. Meriwether displays complete command over the piano keys and an instinct for placing melodic hooks whether they are frilly twirls, avant-garde angles, or finger slides across the keyboard. His music varies from a lounge jazz mood to an intense ballroom tango and a finely tooled quick step. His finger work is athletic and incredibly flexible with interlacing keys that leave his audience in a state of bewilderment.

Tracks like “I’m Confessing That I Love You” and “The Sidewalks Of New York” are delightful cocktail jazz melodies with jolly keys that ski-daddle with a frolicking skip and flashy spreads with gently trembling notes. The intricate piano trills and staccato beats of “Four” are impressive with keys that graze and stab briskly in intervals. The ballroom style of “Ah George Hardly New Ya” has an intense bolero fandango crispness with melodic patterns that form sharp cuts and pleasing piano shuffles. The bluesy jazz textures on numbers like “Gee Baby Ain’t I Good To You” and “After Hours” are womanly like Meriwether is playing the piano for a lady. The lightly shaking keys, the finger slides, and the dreamy sequenced tones are descriptive of the way a woman enters a room and carries herself among company. Maybe I have been watching too many Grace Kelly movies, but the melodic patterns have a feminine feel to them even on the outro of “After Hours” when Meriwether bangs on the keys in a very dramatic fashion. It has a woman’s temperament picturing her throwing a glass vase against the wall, crashing a poreclain lamp on the floor, and finally stomping out of the room and slamming the door behind her. These two songs in particular project such vivid images.

Meriwether’s tune “Soup ‘N’ Onions” has a jazz standard structure with a series of quick drum snaps and curtly plucked bass pulls as the piano keys perform an engaging tap dance with the dizzying pace and intricate twirls of the late Gregory Hines. The bluesy jazz textures of “He Knows How Much We Can Bear” has simmering keys that radiant brilliantly with waves of scat piano phrases that curl up tight and then release periodically. The somber bluesy mood of “St. James Infirmary Blues” is dotted by energetic keys that twitter and slide with unfaltering optimism. The final tune is Roy Meriwether’s rendition of “Jesus Christ Superstar” which has a funk-jazz stylizing with strong drumbeats and zippy keys that saturate the drum fills completely. Meriwether improvises on the tempo shifts and slopes in the chord changes which embellish the melody with avant-chord angles and obtuse contortions. The improvisation has Meriwther’s trademark trills and shuffles everywhere.

Roy Meriwether’s latest album Live At Gilly’s captures the improvisational feel that comes with performing live in front of an audience. Many of the tracks run on and on and project the sense that Meriwether was so enthralled with his finger work that he played longer then if he was making a studio record. Meriwether’s style of piano-jazz is very energetic and produces very bustling movements that build up more steam with each forward motion. Even after the live recording, there is a sense that Meriwether does not expel all of his energy and has more that he wants to play. Now that’s an undying zest for life.



Tracks:

I’m Confessing That I Love You, Four, Ah George We Hardly New Ya, Gee Baby Ain’t I Good To You, The Sidewalks Of New York, After Hours, Soup ‘N’ Onions, He Knows How Much We Can Bear, St. James Infirmary Blues, Jesus Christ Superstar



Artist's Website: http://www.roymeriwether.net

Listen : www.cdbaby.com/cd/roymeriwether5

Reviewed by: Susan Frances

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