It's four years since the brilliant Italian, Enrico Pieranunzi, held the audience in Andrew's Lane Theatre spellbound with an unforgettable exposition of the art of jazz piano. Too long. But at least the memory of that performance should guarantee a full house for his return to Dublin next week.
Pieranunzi is one of the finest pianists to emerge in jazz since the late 1970s, as well as being one of the least known. Barely a decade younger than the likes of Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner, all of whom came to prominence in the 1960s, he is less celebrated than any of them.
In part, it's an accident of birth and geography. Pieranunzi was born in Rome in 1949, where his father, a guitarist, had him taught piano from the age of five. By the time he was 19 he was playing professionally in the quartet of a trombonist, Marcello Rosa, going on to embrace a career which has included working with musicians as disparate as Art Farmer, Charlie Haden, Curtis Fuller, Lee Konitz and Jim Hall.
That Pieranunzi has also devoted much time to classical piano, teaching and composition in his own country has hardly helped to make him a household name elsewhere. But it has given him a rare breadth of experience and this, coupled with his age, has placed him in a position to benefit from the barrier-breaking work of his more famous contemporaries. And he has been moved, too, by the influential playing of their predecessors, Lennie Tristano and, above all, Bill Evans - each, by the way, with a hefty classical weight behind their own work.
All this makes him sound like some kind of post-modern sum total of the past. The reality, however, is vastly different. Pieranunzi doesn't sound like anybody else. He is both a craftsman and a poet, with a visionary openness to everything going on around him, yet somehow capable of gathering these elements into an integrated whole. His work has the clarity, structure and sense of adventure to be expected of the consummate musicianship and maturity he brings to it. And, not incidentally, he can swing hard when the occasion demands it.
In the trio format in which he will be heard here next week, he is a master of dynamics and nuance and, like one of his very early influences, long since absorbed, Bill Evans, a believer in three-way dialogue, with all voices equally important. Significantly, of those who will play with him here, drummer Eliot Zigmund was with Evans, as was Marc Johnson, his regular bassist, whose place will be taken by an equally open-minded musician, Ronan Guilfoyle. It should be a night to remember.
Enrico Pieranunzi, Ronan Guilfoyle and Eliot Zigmund will play at Whelan's on Monday, November 30th, at 8.30 pm.