December 8, 2021
Pianist and composer Ethan Iverson will make his Blue Note debut with the February 11 release of Every Note Is True, an engaging and evocative date featuring a masterful new trio with bassist Larry Grenadier and legendary drummer Jack DeJohnette. The album finds Iverson looking back at, and expanding upon, his own musical history as he revisits the pop/rock influenced jazz style of The Bad Plus, the influential trio that Iverson co-founded in 2000. Iverson has introduced the album with the two-track single “The More It Changes/The Eternal Verities” which is available to stream or download today.
Every Note Is True opens with “The More It Changes,” a kind of benediction upon emerging from a period of enforced isolation, featuring a 44-voice virtual choir culled from Iverson’s network of contacts. The pianist’s wife, writer Sarah Deming, penned the text, which lends the album its name. “I’m a terrible singer,” Iverson admits. “You can hear my warble high in the mix. But I love amateur singing! An amateur choir or a children’s choir is a glorious, almost cinematic sound.”
The cinematic feeling continues with “The Eternal Verities,” an uplifting pop-classical piece inspired by the composer’s mother-in-law, Ruth Deming. “She told me that she liked to sit on her porch and contemplate the eternal verities,” Iverson recalls. “This piece fell out of me the next day. The tune sort of loops around itself in an unexpected way, but its harmonic frame is very basic. Traditional harmony is very, very important to me. It is eternal.”
Since leaving The Bad Plus in late 2017, Iverson has undertaken a diverse range of projects including collaborations with iconic drummers Billy Hart and Albert “Tootie” Heath; recordings with trumpeter Tom Harrell and saxophonist Mark Turner; and compositions for orchestra, big band, and the Mark Morris Dance Group. Each of these, alongside his acclaimed, long-running blog Do the Math and his writings in publications including The New Yorker and The Nation, have allowed Iverson to explore his inspirations from a variety of perspectives.
While Every Note Is True definitely features stylistic elements in common with the sound that Iverson had helped to forge over the 17 years that the original Bad Plus worked together, there is also no doubt that the album showcases a very different trio helmed by a more mature composer. Taking advantage of DeJohnette and Grenadier’s unusually open schedules due to the pandemic’s interruption of live music and touring, Iverson seized the opportunity to arrange a studio date with the two highly in-demand musicians. But it was the leader’s insightful understanding of each player’s voice and talents that made it such an inspired teaming.
“It’s great to hear Larry and Jack swinging out,” Iverson exclaims. “With the two of them, you don’t need a lot of material. If you bring in something really simple, no more than basic sketches, they’ll take it over and make it sound great. That’s very much in the tradition of those great Blue Note records from the 50s and 60s, where the tunes are memorable but there aren’t too many notes on a page.”
The track listing for Every Note Is True is as follows:
- The More It Changes (Ethan Iverson)
- The Eternal Verities (Ethan Iverson)
- She Won’t Forget Me (Ethan Iverson)
- For Ellen Raskin (Ethan Iverson)
- Blue (Jack DeJohnette)
- Goodness Knows (Ethan Iverson)
- Had I But Known (Ethan Iverson)
- Merely Improbable (Ethan Iverson)
- Praise Will Travel (Ethan Iverson)
- At The Bells And Motley (Ethan Iverson)
