And The Music, a blues with echoes of Swinging Shepherd, for example. More often it's an original tune, like the stunningly pretty three-quarter time ballad Carrothers invented three tunes in to the first set at the Halifax Holiday Inn Select Commons Room Friday night on the JazzEast concert. It illustrated, as if preserved in amber, Carrothers' sensitive harmonic imagination. For most of it, recognizing the exquisite fragility of the improvisation, Stewart simply put his sticks down and listened like the rest of us. Carrothers is a master of what music harmony texts call the deceptive cadence.
Jazz musicians call it chord substitution.
When that happens, a mysterious chemistry takes place in the body, like an infusion of warmth. Carrothers introduces these subtle vagarities with such musical intensity you want to hold your breath. Poignant suspensions, poignant dissonances, grind away like a delicate wine on the tip of the tongue. The harmonic style derives from Bill Evans in its transparency and daring, in the execution of which, Carrothers, foot on the soft pedal, applies a soft pressure to the keys, making them yield like soft putty. Stewart began the show by establishing a sharply articulated martial rhythm on the suspended cymbal which was to suture together a remarkable number of rhythmic and harmonic magnetic fields.