Sam Barsh - I Forgot What You Taught Me - RazDaz/Sunnyside SCC 4605, 48:32 *****:

(Sam Barsh - keyboards, piano, melodica; Tim Collins - vibes; Ari Folman-Cohen - bass; Jaimeo Brown - drums)

As much about subtle textures, tweaked genres, crafty beats, and slyly deconstructed song forms as it is about jazz, I Forgot What You Taught Me might underwhelm the first couple of listens.  Indeed, it could be mistaken for smooth jazz by the unwary or inattentive, although it is anything but that.  Still, give it a chance; its multifold charms eventually reveal themselves to those with big ears.

The genius behind this cunning tour de force, Sam Barsh, held the piano chair in the highly regarded Avishai Cohen (the bass player, not the unrelated trumpeter of the same name) Band for several years.  He evidently learned a lot on the bandstand, as well as from his teachers, although this disc’s title acknowledges that he wasn’t always the perfect student and often displayed a madcap streak pretty much everywhere in evidence on this remarkable session.

Take his melodica playing, for example.  This exotic instrument, sounding like a cross between a harmonica and a concertina, has mainly been used for its novelty quality.  Barsh has more serious intentions in mind.  Part John Wolf Brennan, part Michael Moore, he does this slurred-tone thing on it (“Between Dead and Alive”) I’ve never heard before, imbuing the tune with an entirely apposite danse macbre vibe perfectly suited to its Crescent City All Souls Day mood.  Or take “Harriet Nyborg,” with its robotic feel (Nyborg = cyborg?) on which he’s content to play a simple, almost monotonous-sounding vamp while the drums and vibes do all the heavy lifting.  Then there’s “George Dub,” a sleepy-eyed reggae number that somehow summarizes the genre even as it transcends it.  Not to mention “NuTrance,” which accomplishes the near-impossible feat of redeeming this hopeless genre, and the entrancing “Rainy Day Jam,” the unlikely melding of Monk and funk.  Then there’s the free-floating wackiness of “Rainy Day Loop,” which goes nowhere but ends up stuck like a burr in one’s mind. 

Never dull, almost always compelling, I Forgot What You Taught Me manifests some of the finest leftfield jazz of the new millennium.

TrackList:
Intro—Welcome to Barsh’s World
Plans Change
NuTrance
George Dub
Rainy Day Jam
Jew Hefner
Between Dead and Alive
Rainy Day Loop
Harriet Nyborg
Plans Change (Reprise)
This Is the Song
Outro—Goodbye for Now . . .

- Jan P. Dennis