Isaiah J. Thompson's path to the fellowship: Digging deep while keeping the heavens in view

Isaiah J. Thompson showed range of expression, swung hard.

Although several appearances this season fed into evaluation of the five participants in the 2023 American Pianists Awards, recency bias and the sense of occasion that clings to the gala finals lead me to focus on Saturday night's performances by Isaiah J. Thompson, who was awarded the Cole Porter Fellowship in Jazz about 11 p.m. in Hilbert Circle Theatre.

Already an active professional on the New York scene, building upon his academic credentials (two Juilliard degrees), the 25-year-old crowned his Indianapolis season with renditions of the Kern-Hammerstein "Nobody Else But Me" (with guest vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant) and Randy Weston's "Hi-Fly" (with the Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra). The jury chose him over four other finalists: Caelan Cardello, Paul Cornish, Thomas Linger, and Esteban Castro. It's a great distinction, and its recent past was vividly recalled with  a video salute from 2019 winner Emmet Cohen and an onstage visit for a chat with emcee Bill Charlap by 2011 Fellow Aaron Diehl.

First to appear with Salvant, a recent star among the rising crop of jazz singers, Thompson raised in my mind the question how much a pianist is a singer's accompanist and how much a duo partner. Considering that the setting is a piano competition, a fantasy rumination at the keyboard seems appropriate to show off a grasp of the material. On the other hand, the pianist's initial statement should genuinely introduce the vocal. I'm not sure Thompson chose the latter approach, but then neither did Cardello at the start of Cole Porter's "All Through the Night." The others opted more for a solo display that invited the singer in.

That impression was little detriment to what I got from Thompson as he was joined by the BWJO in the finals' second half. In a video about his arrangements, co-founder Brent Wallarab praised what a "grooving" and "in-the-pocket" performance could rise from the Weston tune and a Thompson trio version of it that guided him in making a big-band version. The gala-finals performance rose to the occasion; as Wallarab said in the video with understandable hyperbole: "If you're not dancing, you might be dead." I liked the blend of a Latinesque framing of the tune at first and the straight-ahead swinging episodes that emerged from it; it was not "just another rhumba" (to quote the Gershwin brothers) that launched this "Hi-Fly" so expertly and allowed Thompson to spread his wings while staying focused.

As a listener usually cool to jazz singers, I can't be expected to warm to what Salvant offered Friday

Cecile McLorin Salvant does her own thing.

night. As the late Kevin Mahogany once told me in an interview with reference to Betty Carter: It makes no sense to choose a song because you presumably like it, and then almost ignore the original melody. It's also required, I think, to respect the text. A singer doesn't have an instrumentalist's freedom to address both tune and text obliquely throughout. 

Closest to remaining within what the song has to communicate, while still putting a personal stamp on it, was the way Salvant sang Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady." But in "Lush Life," a remarkable song by Ellington's crucially important associate Billy Strayhorn, I struggle to understand why Salvant put such a huge emphasis on the word "brain." Yes, it's true the "I" person in the song finds regrettable memories burning in her brain, but the sorrows of dissipation are the point of the song. "Lush Life" is not about cognition.

To some, it will seem a huge compliment what Charlap said of Salvant that her interpretations resembled the spirit of painters Jackson Pollock, John Singer Sargent, and Wassily Kandinsky at a party. The bizarre surrealist juxtapositions of Max Ernst seem a closer resemblance.

To move from the funny visual-arts comparison to music, I quickly tired of Salvant's girlish phrasing (derived, I suppose, from Ella Fitzgerald's career-making hit,"A-Tisket, A-Tasket") and linked to what I might call her Eartha Kittenish tone, put under an unlikely yoke with bursts of husky belting a la Cleo Laine.

Kudos to the division of the finals program into duets with a singer and the mutual enhancement of finalist and big band in Wallarab's savvy arrangements (the most remarkable of which Saturday was of Cedar Walton's "Hindsight," which would be worthy of recording with flamboyant finalist Esteban Castro). It certainly can stretch the notion of collaboration to the nth degree, as it did with Salvant, and that's obviously part of assessing what a jazz pianist is capable of.