Solace of the Mind

Maybe the jazz press just resented her forays in the 1980s to embrace R&B, funk, and soul, but pianist Amina Claudine Myers always sought a common ground between her church upbringing in the American South, the Chicago and New York jazz scene, and popular music formats blaring on the radio. She once described her core components to the Times’ Ben Ratliff as “jazz, blues, gospel, and extended forms of music.” Those forces resonate clearly on Solace of the Mind, an album of solo piano and the second vital album Myers has released with Red Hook Records after the eight years of silence following 2016’s Sama Rou. Tribute is paid to the ancestors (featuring a rare turn on synthesizer from Myers), John Lee Hooker, and of course, Bessie Smith. In part because of the slow, deliberate, thorough pacing at which she takes these ten compositions, every single trace element gets to surface and sparkle in the light. It’s precious time spent with an elder still in full command of her powers.