Surely it can’t be long before pianist Henry Butler achieves the recognition and acclaim he deserves.
A New Orleans powerhouse who teaches at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Butler played an all-too-rare Chicago engagement over the weekend at the Green Mill Jazz Club on North Broadway. The fervor and ferocity of his pianism, as well as the brilliance of his technique, suggested that it’s probably just a matter of time before the general public catches up with him.
Though there’s certainly no shortage of jazz pianists with plenty of technical equipment, none addresses the instrument with quite the ardor and audacity that Butler shows the instant he puts fingers to keys.
Little concerned with the niceties of meticulous pedaling and delicate fingerwork, Butler goes instead for sonic power, rhythmic fury, digital speed and a raw emotional intensity that, together, prove impossible to resist.
It’s a positively Lisztian approach to the keyboard, with Butler packing virtually every piece with speedy arpeggios, fast-flying chromatic scales, rumbling bass octaves and massive, organ-like chords. This assault on the instrument does not prove bombastic, thanks to the plush beauty of Butler’s sound and the mercurial nature of his ideas.
Indeed, one never is quite certain in which direction Butler will head next. A dizzying shower of notes might be followed by a moment of stark and unexpected silence; a thunderously stated passage might be interrupted by a languid blues line played by one hand alone.
Though it’s not difficult to detect in this language the inspiration of New Orleans party music and down-home blues, there’s also a harmonic sophistication and a musical volatility here that renders this music very nearly avant-garde.
Consider Butler’s first tune of Saturday night’s show, “Blues for All Seasons.” He opened the piece with a rhapsodic introduction that somehow combined the chordal language of 20th Century jazz with the grandeur of a Bach-Busoni organ fugue. When Butler finally broke into the main swing section, peppering his improvisation with snarling chord-clusters and outlandishly fast bebop lines, one hardly could think of an idiom he hadn’t thrown into the mix.
On “Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise,” Butler seemed to define “softly” on strictly fortissimo terms. And in a radical reworking of the venerable standard “Bye Bye Blackbird,” the pianist stretched the melody line almost to the breaking point.
Clearly, Butler (who was assisted by bassist Eric Hochberg and drummer Paul Wertico) is a formidable talent whose time is yet to come.
