Young Emmet Cohen Handles the Great American Songbook Like an Old Pro

The pianist is increasingly stepping into the well-shined shoes of the great headlining pianist-entertainers of an earlier era, like Erroll Garner, George Shearing, and Ahmad Jamal.

WILL FRIEDWALD 

Thursday, September 7, 2023 

At 33, Emmet Cohen has time to play with — so much so that the pianist opened a five night, 10-show run at Birdland on Tuesday with the 1930 Vincent Youmans standard “Time on My Hands.” 

I’ll wager that he first heard it from Ahmad Jamal. It’s not that he emulated Jamal’s two famous versions, in the studio in 1960 and live in 1961; the major tip-off was in the quote from “Rockin’ in Rhythm,” which Jamal plays right as he’s about to go into the coda. Mr. Cohen inserted the same quote in the same spot. 

The nod to Ahmad, if you’ll forgive the rhyme, was highly appropriate: When Mr. Cohen first attracted my attention a few years ago, he struck me as the first young pianist since Bill Charlap to do something consistently new and notable with the traditional Great American Songbook. 

Recently, with his mounting popularity — accelerated by his widely watched Monday night livestreams and his exuberant new trio, with bassist Phillip Norris and drummer Joe Farnsworth — Mr. Cohen is increasingly stepping into the well-shined shoes of the great headlining pianist-entertainers of an earlier era, like Erroll Garner, George Shearing, and Jamal, who left us in April at the age of 92. 

After transforming the Youmans ballad into a vigorous stomper, Mr. Cohen wanted to show that he has even more time at his disposal, and launched into “Time After Time,” which again seemed like truth in advertising, or at least a title to be taken literally. There was time and rhythm to spare, and as if to underscore that point, about a minute in he tossed in the opening bars of “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm.” This was another love song reworked as a powerful uptempo, but then before delivering the climax, he briefly dialed down the intensity and put the July Styne medley into 3/4 for a few lines.

Mr. Cohen’s only original of the set, “Spillin’ the Tea,” which is also heard on his current album, “Uptown in Orbit,” was offered as a tribute to the ragtime and stride traditions, which flourished at Harlem, where Mr. Cohen resides and where he livestreams “Emmet’s Place.” Yet rather than striving for strict authenticity in these early jazz piano idioms, he utilized them in a decidedly modern manner. Among other things, Mr. Cohen made full use of the bass and drums in a way that historical ragtime and stride performances rarely do, and he structured the piece in more of a contemporary context. 

Having already given us multiple slices of time, he proceeded with another piece of Styne, “People” from “Funny Girl,” which followed in a relaxed, lightly Latin reading. Although Mr. Cohen mentioned Barbra Streisand in his intro, his treatment reminded me more of Nat King Cole’s lesser known 1964 single version — up to a point, at least. 

That point arrived in the middle of a bass solo from Mr. Norris, when all of a sudden the entire tune shifted into “Dardanella,” a sample of Tin Pan Alley exotica circa 1919 that Mr. Cohen plays on his 2020 album “Future Stride.” Even more than “Time on My Hands,” this is a nod to Ahmad — “Dardanella” becomes a Middle Eastern sister to “Poinciana,” featuring the Cohen Trio’s own answer to Jamal’s signature vamp. 

The trio followed with two tunes by legendary pianists, “Thag’s Dance” by Oscar Peterson, from the 1961 London House live sessions, and “I’ll Keep Loving You” by Bud Powell. While plenty of pianists do the latter, almost no one after Peterson himself has recorded the former. 

He then recast Burton Lane’s “If This Isn’t Love” into an impossibly fast bopper and concluded with Billy Strayhorn’s “Satin Doll,” as a romper that constitutes a mini miracle of keyboard choreography, utilizing stops and starts, unexpected pauses, rests, and breaks.

A generation ago, around the time Mr. Cohen was born, “Satin Doll” seemed overdone, and was almost heard too often in jazz clubs; as the venerable Dan Morgenstern observed, it became sort of what “My Melancholy Baby” had been a generation or two before that. By treating the song with freshness, originality, and boundless imagination, Emmet Cohen shows us that there’s a dance in the old doll yet.