Lara Driscoll's debut album, 2020's
Woven Dreams, showcases the Chicago pianist's delicate and intricately crafted post-bop jazz. Joining her are her trio bandmates, bassist Paul Rushka and drummer
Dave Laing. Together they play a harmonically nuanced brand of straight-ahead acoustic jazz that brings to mind the virtuosic approach of classic artists like
Oscar Peterson and
Bill Evans, as well as contemporary players like
Fred Hersch and the late
Geri Allen. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Montreal's McGill University,
Driscoll has played with such luminaries as
Terell Stafford,
Chip McNeill,
Jean-Michel Pilc, and many others. She also teaches on the faculty at Loyola University, DePaul University, and Harold Washington College. All of which is to say that she brings a high level of experience and skill to her first album as a leader. Here, she primarily focuses on her engaging original compositions, with a handful of standards peppered throughout, including a fluid take on "Autumn in New York" and a dusky rendition of
Billy Strayhorn's poetic "Isfahan." Not simply content to play a basic "head arrangement,"
Driscoll favors extended introductions and outros that spotlight her thoughtful compositional ear. She applies a similarly measured approach to her original works, engaging in kinetic contrapuntal interplay with her bandmates on the flamenco-tinged "Siblings" and sinking with slowly nodding deliberation into the atmospheric ballad "Mamy Adieu." At the core of the album is the three-part "Forgiving - Black Dog Skirts Away." Beginning with an atmospheric tone poem, it finds
Driscoll steadily expanding upon the thematic and harmonic material over the three separate movements in what ends up feeling like a mini film-noir soundtrack. Also compelling is her ebulliently funky version of
Antônio Carlos Jobim's "O Morro Não Tem Vez (Favela)" and her brisk reading of
Cole Porter's "Just One of Those Things."
Driscoll ends
Woven Dreams with her impressionistic title-track ballad, a nod to her penchant for wearing scarfs and a perfect metaphor for the airy, effortlessly layered music on display here. ~ Matt Collar