Recording of the Week, Billy Childs, The Winds of Change

Of the generation of pianists who came of age in the eighties, 5-time GRAMMY Award-winner Billy Childs stands as one of the most uniquely gifted and versatile. Operating broadly in the post-bop idiom, Childs's musical vision as both a player and arranger touches upon soul, chamber music, choral, orchestral, and pop, and he has collaborated with a diverse array of artists over the years, including Freddie Hubbard, Chris Botti, and Dianne Reeves. Childs has an exquisite lightness of touch which often imbues his faster bop playing with a carefree joyfulness, and 35 years on from his debut as a leader, 1988’s Take for Example This… it’s great to hear that he’s lost not one jot of this spirit.

The Winds of Change find Childs in stellar company, with trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, bassist Scott Colley, and drummer Brian Blade all gracing the album with their presence. Together they play a mix of originals and covers, loosely inspired by the film noir-ish soundtracks of composers like Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith and Michel Legrand (the cover photo which features Childs leaning against a bar, with a glass of bourbon to his side, helps reinforce this association).

Things get off to a brisk start with the sparky ‘The Great Western Loop’, which references the 7000-mile hiking trail that starts in southern California, goes to the edge of Canada, and then tracks back via the Grand Canyon. The music really succeeds in capturing the open vistas of such a trek, speeding up and slowing down, with Colley and Blade working together as the engine powering Akinmusire and Childs through numerous different sections. The title track was composed for the late Roy Hargrove and the Symphonic Jazz Orchestra, and offers Akinmusire an ever-morphing backdrop of chiaroscuro textures on which to tease out his deeply melancholic, hard-boiled trumpet lines. Childs’s block chords offer a suitably thick, orchestral substitute here, and are well contrasted with the section when he has space for a lighter solo towards the end of the track.

Particularly striking on the album is the sense of the group progressing through a series of scenes that could indeed come for a single film narrative. The End of Innocence follows the title track, and almost feels like a commentary on the music that preceded it. I especially enjoyed the rhythm section’s lengthy breakdown here, the impact of which is aided by the punchy recording and well balanced stereo separation.

The covers include Chick Corea's 1972 composition 'Crystal Silence', which often finds Akinmusire gracefully shadowing Childs’s lines. For a complete change of moods this is followed by a pungent take on Kenny Barron's ‘The Black Angel’, which finds Colley tightening up the torque on his kit several notches for some quite unforgiving playing that demands a degree of subservience from the rest of the band (in a good way!).