With Caelan Cardello, Premiere Series enters its 2023 last act, as presenting APA moves toward Cole Porter Fellowship

Caelan Cordello delivered first-class piano jazz.

 A personal take on the mainstream of post-bop piano impressed a capacity audience during the first set of the Premiere Series performances Saturday night by Caelan Cardello.

Following the usual format of hour-long sets including bassist Nick Tucker and drummer Kenny Phelps, Cardello is the fourth of five finalists in the 2023 American Pianists Association jazz piano competition.  He is spending the better part of two weeks in Indianapolis, with the Jazz Kitchen trio appearance climaxing the end of the first week of residency. 

The New Jerseyite has  the unusual story of being first exposed to music while in the womb — the ultimate in early-start stories among musicians (attendees learned about it in the program book). Many years of post-birth training later, Cordello is more than ready to display his absorption of the modern-jazz tradition in a keyboard style that spans generations easily and puts a personal stamp on everything.

I particularly liked his inventiveness with the old standard "I'm Old-Fashioned," and not just because he tucked a witty quote from "Pop Goes the Weasel" into his solo. There were flights of fancy wholly unreliant on quotation. He treated the tune respectfully but with admirable freedom. Tucker's tidy solo provided just the right amount of relief without posing a huge contrast to Cardello's gently extravagant playing.

Tucker's mastery of the part of his instrument's basic vocabulary known as the "walking" bass provided a lot of the devout vigor in "Grace of God," a piece by the late Harold Mabern, one of Cordello's teachers and a major influence, as the pianist said. Cordello took an eloquent single-line solo a la Bud Powell. Phelps knew just when to switch from brushes to sticks and back again. The coda was aptly meditative and exquisitely detailed. So was the one appended to Cole Porter's "Easy to Love," with its teasing insinuations.

Peppy, hard driving at rapid tempos characterized "Black Holes" by Renee Rosnes and "Up There" by Ray Brown. The latter piece had a lengthy unaccompanied section in which Cordello boisterously channeled James P. Johnson, the godfather of stride piano.

 The excitement had already been signaled in the opening piece (Freddie Hubbard's "Thermo"), its stop-start rhythmic profile showing how well the competition finalist and the two local masters he was working with had achieved rapport.

Throughout that first set, Cordello's maturity and his comfort locking into tradition never got in the way of his coming up with fresh inspirations. The blend bodes well for his success as the APA Awards proceed. 

[Photo by Rob Ambrose]