Enrico Pieranunzi & Paul Motian
Doorways

THE REVIEW

There are women who are subtly cerebral, women with a discreet yet fatal charm. Women who may not immediately enter your heart, but who gradually insinuate themselves until you find yourself caught in a plot bigger than you, a plot where the more you struggle, the more you get entangled. Women who tie you with threads of love as precious but fragile as strings of pearls. Women who might give you this album, only to leave you alone to listen to it on any "Blue Evening," with your thoughts spreading over her like ripples from a stone of solitude thrown straight into the heart.

Paul Motian is perhaps the most lyrical of jazz drummers. The man who managed to elevate the drum set to the rank of a melodic instrument. The man whose drumming is subtly similar to the heartbeat of someone in love, sometimes irregular, sometimes unexpected, at times muted, always poetic nonetheless. And when this pulsing heart marries a cerebral and thoughtful pianism, like that of Pieranunzi in this album, you get "Doorways". The album revolves around three totally improvised pieces, the three "Double Excursion". Duets where the piano and drums communicate in an almost telepathic manner, creating a kind of weightless atmosphere in which music floats freely like a body in space. Music that is not immediate, of course, at times embedded like an unresolved thought, but still intense and inexplicable like a tender obsession.

This album is strange. You need to take the time to savor it. Maybe while walking on a gray autumn afternoon on a beach, listening to those "Words of the Sea" that you couldn't or didn't want to hear in the summer. Or thinking of that waltz you didn't dance to, while Pieranunzi dedicates to Motian "No Waltz For Paul". Or even thinking of the woman who gave it to you. And when you told her that "I love you" to which there was never any response, except with her lips brushing against yours in something that wasn't a kiss but merely a goodbye.

And so you listen again to the track of the album dearest to your heart, that "Suspension Points" that plays out entirely on a single repeated note. And you think that sometimes a single note, or a single moment, is enough to make a piece of music or a love truly great.