Eldorado - Pat Jaffe
Early on Sunday mornings, I get up, leave Grace sleeping in bed and get ready to go for a nice long run. This has become something of a weekly ritual for me, a long weekend run where I can listen to a few albums ambling around the quiet parks and streets of Melbourne. One particular Sunday, I put my headphones on and set off listening to Pat Jaffe’s Eldorado. The slightly muted, opening chords of Sketch immediately became the perfect accompaniment to the sunlight warming my face as I ran through the trees in the park near my house. I could already sense that this was going to be a good run!
My friend Dom likes to tease me about the types of music I listen to when I go running, confounded by the apparent lack of relationship between the activity and the song choices. Her thinking is that the music needs to be fast and energetic to motivate her to keep going. Dom’s recommendations have been Pantera, Kanye West and Rage Against the Machine. I love to goad Dom by playing her my recent running playlists that are filled with weird, avant-garde jazz or Bach solo violin sontatas. Whilst Dom might protest, I think Eldorado makes for perfect running music. On this particular morning, it seemed to marry with the surrounds in such a beautiful way. I live for moments like this, when the music you’re listening to in headphones becomes like the soundtrack to your own, personal movie (a wonderful 21st century phenomenon).
After I left the bright athleisure wear of the Botanical Gardens behind and cruised further down along the Yarra, I delved deeper into my own little headphone world. The thing that immediately struck me from the first few notes of Eldorado is the warmth and softness of the piano sound, captured in amazing detail. Knowing very little about pianos and even less about recording them, I get the sense this is a delicate balance that is hard to get right. While I love the music on those amazing ECM solo piano records by Keith Jarrett and Paul Bley, sometimes there is an austere, coolness to the way the piano is recorded that can leave me feeling a bit removed as a listener. But on Eldorado it feels as if you’ve been invited into Pat’s home, offered a cup of tea and are then sat down right next to the piano for your own personal concert. This is really comforting music that is the perfect calming tonic for the anxious year we’re all having, a beautiful moment of respite amongst the madness of 2020.
The tenderness of the first few notes of Wrong Train Home is palpable, and as it becomes more and more in time, I pleasantly noticed the cadence of my steps aligning with the off-beat quavers throughout. It’s normally around this point that I’d be starting to grow bored of this sort of pretty, solo piano music. There can be a tendency for it to be too diatonic, with lots of brooding, out of time chords and not a lot of melody or variation in texture or character. What has kept me coming back to Eldorado is that it’s supremely melodic. Each track, though similar, has a melodic thread that makes it feel like a self-contained song. What is so captivating is how Pat develops the narrative of the song, stringing you along through its twists and turns. Whilst I can’t say for sure how much of the music is improvised, any improvisation seems to function on a really subtle level. Pat isn’t throwing long lines of linear solos at the listener but improvisers more through slight rhythmic and textural variations in how a chord might be voiced or a melody phrased.
Ultimately, this is a far deeper concept that really acknowledges the nature of the instrument as a whole. Take the track Flow as a prime example. While I could listen to that opening chromatic bassline rubbing up against the melody on its own, the magic of the music is what Pat puts in between those two points. Those whole tone-y arpeggios give everything an unsettled quality, like you’re in harmonic quicksand where you can’t seem to keep your tonal footing. As the music develops, I love the way the harmony becomes more apparent creating a new context for the bassline.
By the time the last track Hannah rolls around, I’ve forgotten that I’m running and I’m just enjoying the way the melody weaves between the strings and piano. There is something very old fashioned about this type of writing, a strong, simple melody that gets developed, modulates to different keys and passed around between the different instruments. It demonstrates a real maturity and in 2020, feels strangely modern and edgy! As the melody returns one last time in the upper register of the piano and the album draws to a close, I realised that I still quite quite a ways left to go. Normally I’d have moved onto another album for something a little different but this time, I just let it play on again from the start.