Avenging Angel is the first album Craig Taborn made under his own name for ECM, and it is a record of solo piano. It joins a long line of solo piano albums on the label. Taborn, though, works less with themes than with the sound of the instrument itself: struck notes, sustain, overtones and the decay of each attack. Each of the thirteen pieces grows from a small motif or mood, and together they run for over seventy minutes.
Taborn came to the album after ECM sessions with Roscoe Mitchell, Evan Parker, David Torn and Michael Formanek. He recorded it alone on a Steinway D in the recital room of the Auditorio RSI in Lugano, in the summer of 2010, with Manfred Eicher producing and Stefano Amerio as engineer. The music is credited to Taborn, and reviewers heard it as improvised in the moment while holding together as structure.
The opening The Broad Day King keeps a single note repeating in the right hand while the left hand searches out melodic ideas around it. Glossolalia moves in rapid, skittering runs up and down the keyboard, with both hands equally busy. In the title track a surging chordal pattern in the low octaves slowly thickens into denser figures, never leaving the bottom half of the piano. Between these, quieter pieces leave more space, letting each note ring out and fade before the next one arrives.
Nate Chinen in The New York Times called it "a brilliant and unpredictable study informed by contemporary classical music as well as several currents of improvisation". He also heard flashes of Ligeti or Messiaen, and a fascination with pure sound. John Fordham in The Guardian described "whispered, wide-spaced figures, ringing overtones, evaporating echoes and glowering contrapuntal cascades". In Jazzwise, Kevin Le Gendre found it a triumph for its richness of content and attention to detail. Ludovic Florin in Jazz Magazine singled out Spirit Hard Knock and Neither-Nor as free pieces of great precision, the first built on splintered repeated motifs, the second on deliberate desynchronisation.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2207, first released on 13 May 2011.
