Michael Winther and Dan Tepfer

January 16, 2013

The Metropolitan Room  –  January 4, 11, 17 18

Usually a pianist playing behind or alongside a featured singer is considered an accompanist. But not always. When Kenny Werner plays for Betty Buckley, what occurs is a collaboration between equal partners. This is often the case as well with Rick Jensen and whomever he’s partnering. It’s also true of jazz pianist Dan Tepfer and his recent pairing with adventurous singer Michael Winther, who usually likes to apply his liquid tenor to the work of top-drawer contemporary tunesmiths.

The effect of the Buckley-Werner alliance, for instance, and now of Winther and Buckley—as a result of the current Metropolitan Room dates—is that the vocal-instrumental meld produces something somehow grander in scope, even akin to tone poems. That’s to say the latitude for the pianist to explore what the song inspires in him not only during breaks but as it supports and enhances the singing is more than allowed—it’s encouraged.

During the loose Winther-Tepfer set—perhaps occasionally a shade too-loose—that I attended, Winther mentioned that he and Tepfer teamed in response to a suggestion by jazz pianist Fred Hersch. The result for him, Winther said at one point, is “an exercise in non-attachment.” Later, he referred to ‘this experiment of sorts.” By those comments, he clearly had to let go of his familiarity with the strictures of theater performing and give in to improvisational flow.

 

From where I sat enthralled, the “exercise”—the “experiment”—is a success with the potential to be that much more exciting the more Winther and Tepfer become accustomed to each other and trust one another’s instincts. In a series of ten songs and a Tepfer solo, the high mark for me was reached with the John Lennon-Paul McCartney “Blackbird.” My reaction could, of course, be very personal, because ever since I first heard the piece, I’ve found it as profound a musical plumbing of death-anticipation as any ever written.

Because Winther seems constitutionally averse to vocal tricks, the purity of his singing and the sense of flight that Tepfer imparted with his keyboard explorations were exquisite. When they’d reached an ending that was, in Wordworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” phrase, “too deep for tears,” Winther mentioned he’d sung “take these drunken eyes” instead of “take these sunken eyes” on one of the go-rounds. No matter. He made it work—maybe even improved it with the foray into unconscious improv.

The other outstanding piece in an outstanding glimpse of what the Winther-Tepfer combo could become were they to keep this up was the accelerating, crescendoing treatment given to John Mayer’s terribly wise “Stop This Train.” This may be the one in which Winther did his most emotive acting, possibly because—as he implied in a spoken lead-in about the ditty’s describing the psychological effects of hovering between childhood and maturity—it’s the song that most closely fits his own view of himself.

If what I’ve written so far gives the impression there’s a bit of the esoteric in what Winther and Tepfer are doing, then I’ve given the correct impression. They’re hardly a run-of-the-mill act. (Thank providence for that!) Yet, when the encore is a luscious version of Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean?” and a jumpin’ go at The Spiral Staircase hit “More Today Than Yesterday” (Pat Upton) is included, they can hardly be called inaccessible.

 

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