My review of Adam Holzman's smokin' new group record, Truth Decay, today at All About Jazz.
Truly a musician's musician, Adam Holzman's career, visibility-wise, has waxed and waned over the keyboardist's thirty-year career, but he's never been less than busy. His time spent with Miles Davis, during the last years of the music icon's life, helped raise the masterful and broad-reaching keyboardist/producer's profile. Certainly, based on his work with jazz artists including Davis protégée Wallace Roney, Davis reissue producer/saxophonist Bob Belden, Grover Washington Jr. and Michel Petrucciani from 1989 to 2010, Holzman has kept plenty of prestigious company. And why shouldn't he? In the jazz world, he's a keyboardist with a full appreciation for its tradition, its broad and sophisticated language, and the demands made by a genre that has continued to evolve in a myriad of ways since emerging around the turn of the 20th century.
But Holzman, son of Elektra and Nonesuch Records founder Jac Holzman, has always been even more expansive in his interests and musical predilections. He has been running a weekly "funny 'cause it's true" comic strip on his Facebook page that was recently collected into a self-released paperback book with the same title, Things That Aren't That Big a Deal: But Still Bug the Shit Out of Me! (2017). He's explored electronic music with his own Parallel Universe: Solo Electronic Explorations (Composers Concordance Recordings, 2013). He's also participated in ex-Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek's modern day exploration of classical composer Carlo Orff's Carmina Burana (A&M, 1983), produced by Philip Glass and Kurt Munkacsi.
And that's only scratching the surface. An exceptional pianist, Holzman's intrinsic virtuosity is further elevated by a particularly strong sense of color and texture, as demonstrated by the various keyboards employed on Truth Decay, his first studio band outing since Spork (Big Fun, 2010). In addition to acoustic piano, Truth Decay finds Holzman employing a broad array of keyboards, ranging from Memotron (a digital Mellotron) and various electric pianos, like Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer, to Hammond organ and assorted Moog, Korg and Kurzweil synths, many often fed through outboard effects like ring modulation, delay and more.
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