PUTTING FIRE IN THE CANON

By David E. Thigpen

Jazz piano is so glutted with talent these days that it's hard to get through a week without another new prodigy popping up somewhere. With flying-fingered young virtuosos like Marcus Roberts, Cyrus Chestnut and Eric Reed trying to outdo one another on showy new solo albums and jostling for attention in nightclubs from Bourbon Street to Greenwich Village, competition on the keyboards is more intense than it has been in years. In the midst of all this musical gunslinging, it would be easy to overlook Jacky Terrasson, a newcomer from Paris. But that would be a mistake.

Terrasson, 29, comes to the game with a well-formed sound that relies on inventiveness and vision rather than pure razzle-dazzle. Equipped with a degree in classical piano from the Parisian conservatory Lycee Lamartine, which he topped off with a year of jazz studies at Boston's rigorous Berklee College of Music, Terrasson mixes a thorough knowledge of the jazz canon--from Cole Porter to Duke Ellington to Miles Davis--with a rich harmonic sense and a carefully reined iconoclasm. On his debut album, Jacky Terrasson (Blue Note), he squeezes fresh insight and nuance out of fossilized tunes like My Funny Valentine, Bye Bye Blackbird and Porter's I Love Paris by accelerating the tempos, throwing in breakneck stops and starts and reassembling the melodies as if shuffling a deck of cards. The effect is to make sentimental and familiar numbers sound strangely renewed. "There's really no point in covering standards if you're not going to make them sound fresh," Terrasson says. Anyone who listens to his treatment of a standby such as Time After Time will agree.

Like many of the new young pianists, Terrasson has speed to burn, and he can lay down impressive, swirling solos in the rushing, post-bop style in vogue today. He undergirds his right-hand notes with layers of richly configured chords in the complex manner of pianists like Bill Evans and Hank Jones. Occasionally Terrasson will use three or four notes when one would suffice. But his revitalization of the standards is what's getting him deserved notice. That's because Terrasson's style--a fertile union of jazz avant-garde and classical--is recognizably a mix of controlled aggression and profound affection, something very close to an act of love.