Laraaji is well-known as an early practitioner of ambient, New Age, and celestial sounds, but his latest release, Sun Piano, out July 17 on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through the All Saints label, features the artist alone with the titular instrument in a marked departure from what he’s released before. The reality is that the contents connect to Laraaji’s early days, which is to say his youth (this takes us back to the 1950s), but with the kicker that the results aren’t such a radical departure from his highest-profile stuff after all. If you’ve made room on your shelf for the guy’s other records, it’s a safe bet that you’ll want to grab this one, too. It’s the first in a piano trilogy.
A lot of older folks were introduced to Laraaji through the 1981 LP Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, which was the third installment in Brian Eno’s ambient series. As I’m not quite as aged as the listeners I’m speaking off, my personal Laraaji discovery was his album-closing selection “(excerpt from) Bring Forth” on the Shimmy Disc Records various artists compilation The 20th Anniversary of the Summer of Love, which as you might have surmised, came out in 1987.
I did hear Ambient 3: Day of Radiance shortly thereafter however, as I’m still rightly assessed as an older cat. Furthermore, the LP has been described as the biggest selling item in Laraaji’s discography. That’s unsurprising, but I’ll speculate that a fair portion of the guy’s younger fans may not be familiar with that career milestone. That’s because he’s been busy in recent years, particularly as a collaborator.
Specifically, he’s created with u-ground acts Blues Control (FRKWYS Vol. 8, 2011, RVNG Intl.) and Sun Araw (Professional Sunflow, 2016, W.25th), plus took part in a three-way collab with Dallas Acid and Arji OceAnanda (Arrive Without Leaving, 2018, Flying Moonlight). There have also been extensive reissues of his DIY tape work on the Numero Group and Leaving labels, plus a 2018 remix album Sun Transformations, released by All Saints.
I was going to say “early career milestone” in the paragraph above, but the fact is that Laraaji had numerous achievements under his belt prior to Ambient 3: Day of Radiance’s emergence: He’d worked as a comedian and warmed up crowds at the Apollo Theater in NYC, acted in various theater productions (including with a pre-Easy Reader Morgan Freeman), landed a bit part in Robert Downey Sr.’s cult classic Putney Swope, and, to get us back to music, he played in the ’70s fusion band Winds of Change.
But Sun Piano circles back to before all those activities and, to reference All Saints’ PR for this release, presents Laraaji “fulfilling a lifelong ambition to return to his first instrument.” While this can read like a cool endeavor in pixels, I can’t deny being more than a mite worried, as the impulse of New Age-associated artists when focusing on the piano can regularly be substantially less than wonderful in execution.
To be blunt, this is because the music too often sounds like the kind of junk heard in an antihistamine commercial, a malady shared with a significant portion of the current neo-classical field (especially when they are also focused on tinkling those 88s). That is (for those who smartly mute the commercials), they excrete an inspirational aura that might work alright for thirty seconds (debatable), but then begins to grate on the nerves when stretched out for longer (or after you’ve endured the advertisement 30 fucking times or more).
It’s undeniable that portions of Sun Piano fit into this scenario, which shouldn’t be a shock, as Laraaji not only issued a record named Day of Radiance but also A Tape for Emotional Cleansing (1987, Creative Sound Recordings) and Flow Goes the Universe (1992, All Saints), plus a handful of titles with the word “celestial” in the title, and also the word “bliss.”
But Laraaji manages to make Sun Piano surprisingly palatable, largely because the dozen pieces, classified by All Saints as “elegant miniatures,” work best as an uninterrupted whole (well, with one interruption on vinyl), with the uplifting positivity at the beginning, perhaps best exemplified by the third piece “Flow Joy,” moving toward an atmosphere, nearer to the close in tracks “Lifting Me,” “Timeless,” and closer “Embracing Timeless,” that inches into the neighborhood of Downtown Minimalism.
I can dig that progression. It surely also helps that “Flow Joy” and the selections immediately following, “Shenandoah” and “This Too Shall Pass,” feature a strain of uplift that’s a smidge achy, putting me in the mind of the modest soundtrack to a small-budgeted coming of age film, one with an intellectual edge, made between 1977-’82. By extension, I ended up thinking of tweed suitcoats and the autumn season, which are two things I’m wholly in favor of.
Neither is something I expected to contemplate while listening to a Laraaji record, but that’s more than okay. Sun Piano isn’t a jaw-dropping experience, but my teeth didn’t gnash once, and the whole has me interested in the next installment of the trilogy, Moon Piano, and the piano-autoharp duet EP to follow later this year. Speaking of harp, the producer of the record Jeff Zeigler has worked with harpist Mary Lattimore. To hear Laraaji on keys and Lattimore on strings would be a treat. It would undoubtedly be celestial. I’m just thinking out loud here…
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
