Violin virtuoso Kristin Lee serves up a delightful and stylistically wide-ranging cornucopia of American music, performed with unalloyed joy, style and effortless technique, abetted by Jeremy Ajani Jordan’s equally brilliant pianism on most tracks. You can’t get a stronger start to a program than John Novacek’s irrepressible and imaginative Four Rags, where the high craft of virtuoso violin transcriptions a la Heifetz meets great “old school” jazz violin masters like Joe Venuti and Stuff Smith. Next is Jordan’s elegantly flashy arrangement of George Gershwin’s But Not for Me, where the pianist sneaks in some Art Tatum-esque runs. Jordan’s sensitive arrangement of the great jazz trombonist and composer J.J. Johnson’s Lament organically fuses jazz and classical idioms.
By contrast, Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer gets a thorough bebop updating, and truly swings. Jun Cho takes over the piano bench for a flexible and beautifully sung out reading of Amy Beach’s Romance. Lee’s uniformly rich sonority in all registers ennobles her straightforward and dignified interpretation of Burleigh’s Southland Sketches. As it happens, Jonathan Ragonese’s “non-poem 4” begins rather poetically before slipping into a wildly energized “Bartok meets Piazzolla” section. Kevin Puts darkly lyrical Air sets the stage for Thelonious Monk’s “Monk’s Mood.” Jordan smooths out the stringy edges of Monk’s trademark runs and arpeggios, while Lee’s long phrases never seem to run out of bow. Would Monk have liked such an “un-Monk-ish” interpretation? Maybe not, yet such heartfelt, tasteful and sincere music making cannot be disparaged. A wonderful disc.
