Orrin Evans Trio

Ars Nova Workshop presents an evening with the Orrin Evans Trio, in performance at Solar Myth on Thursday, January 12, 2023.

Orrin Evans

For more than two decades, pianist Orrin Evans has made an art form of the unexpected. With more than 25 albums to his credit without ever relying on the support of a major label, Evans has become the model of a fiercely independent artist who’s made a habit of rattling the jazz world’s confining cages. That determination has paid off in accolades like topping the “Rising Star Pianist” category in the 2018 DownBeat Critics Poll and two Grammy nominations.

Evans bedrocks his speculative sensibility with virtuoso command of the piano and deep assimilation of the fundamentals. A deft tune deconstructor, he commands vocabulary across a broad timeline of swinging, blues-infused hardcore jazz and spiritual jazz/avant-garde jazz dialects, as well as the Euro-canon, and conveys his stories with the intuitive spontaneity of an ear player. He projects an instantly recognizable sound, sometimes creating flowing rubato tone poems, sometimes embodying the notion that the piano comprises 88 tuned drums.

Evans’ polyglot compositions—influenced by the expansive, individuality-first Black Music culture of his native Philadelphia and a decade of playing in the Mingus Big Band—similarly inform an environment of “structured freedom” that instigates personnel to push the envelope in all his projects. These include the Eubanks Evans Experience (a recent venture with eminent guitarist Kevin Eubanks); the just-formed Brazilian unit Terreno Comum; Evans’ working trio with bassist Luques Curtis and drummer Mark Whitfield; Jr.; and Tar Baby (a collective trio of 20 years standing with bassist Eric Revis and drummer Nasheet Waits).