Review: Buffalo News on Dave Frank’s Portrait Of New York
“Scrawl it on the walls the way they used to when Charlie Parker died: Dave McKenna Lives! And in the exact same way that “Bird Lives” was, in its way, true all those years ago. McKenna’s death in 2008 after a singular life of solo jazz piano didn’t entirely rob jazz of fearsomely virtuosic mainstream pianists with ripping left-hand basslines and right hands capable of improvising triple-time runs on top of that thundering bass. It’s one of the rarest of all jazz skills when it’s performed at length, and we still have at least two pianists who can function fully in the McKenna mode - Buffalo-born wonderment Mike Jones and New York’s Dave Frank, former piano professor at the Berklee School of Music and now the grand wizard of his own jazz school in midtown Manhattan. The new disc by Frank begins in mid-McKenna mode, with a reconfiguration of the old jazz standard “Tangerine,” which Frank calls “Full Force NYC.” Before he’s finished, he is, McKenna style, making sure you know that he does more than just swing the house down and dance on the debris. He can sing his way through “This Nearly Was Mine” and play a rubato version of Gershwin’s “My Man’s Gone Now” that has all the sensitivity in the world but not an ounce of cocktail lounge background decoration. And that may be because Frank numbers among his earliest teachers, the great Lennie Tristano, another left-hand master of parallel piano lines. On one tune, he even marries two of his favorites and calls it “McKenna/McCoy” — the latter, of course, meaning McCoy Tyner. This is Frank’s fourth disc on the Jazzheads label. And it’s a triumph.”
