Variations Pirouet****

Hays is a talent marching to a different drummer, underlined in Open Range, an understated, pastoral-tinged piano solo album for ACT in 2004. He's still doing it his way. The 24 short variations here, more classical than jazz without quite belonging to either, explore possibilities worked out by Hays with composer and saxophonist Patrick Zimmerli. The sources range from a Schumann theme to bare-bones melodic and rhythmic ideas, or occasionally an actual form by Hays, each examined in two to four sets of variations spread over three groups. With their taut, imaginative beauty, they also share this gifted improviser's rigorous refusal to dwell for long on any one variation. Despite their tantalising brevity, the results are striking and moving, notably the Schumann variations and those on Hays's Song for the Amiable Child, Contrapunctusand the veiled Rumi's View. see pirouet.com