Pianist Tigran Hamasyan spent formative years on the Los Angeles and New York scene, but never denied his Armenian roots in his music. Exactly opposite. Now, for the first time ever, he tackles the iconic songs of the Great American Songbook, without fear or excessive respect.
Hamasyan is a unique figure among pianists. It excels in its ability to bring sophisticated and challenging music to a wider audience. "I compose and play what comes from my heart - that's probably the trick," explains the pianist himself, who even as a toddler had a tendency to play with tape recorders or the piano instead of ordinary children's toys. After all, at the age of three he was already looking for ways to play songs by the Beatles, Louis Armstrong, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Queen on the piano. When he was sixteen, his family moved to the United States, where Hamasyan soon won a number of piano competitions, including the top prize in the Monk Competition. The trophy is all the more valuable because the jury was chaired by Herbie Hancock. Since then, Hamasyan's professional career has begun, during which he has already released ten consecutive albums.
The latest so far, with a release date of 2022, is called StandArt and features arrangements of songs from the Great American Songbook performed by Hamasyan's trio, which also includes double bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Justin Brown. “If there's any downside to the new versions of songs from the Great American Songbook that singers and jazz instrumentalists put out every year, it's the shared feeling that the songs are sacred, untouchable. It's as if everyone covering Laura or Body and Soul signed a non-aggression pact and promised to only tread lightly between the basic building blocks of those songs,” says Hamasyan. What is happening at StandArt is the exact opposite. Familiar melodies just subtly bubble up while every other aspect of the music undergoes vivid and surprising transformations. Hamasyan approaches these songs as exercises in theme and variation. He balances pre-prepared surfaces with the in-the-moment spontaneity of improvisation, resulting in new ways to hear old tunes. The mercurial Hamasyan, who has released records in the last decade that collide wistful folk melodies with dense heavy metal thunder, simply has no interest in parroting the old language. A nimble thinker, he loves the standard repertoire—but not its standard processing. He looks for something special in it and creates his own world.
