Jacky Terrasson: Push

If technique were the only thing that mattered, Jacky Terrasson could demolish most jazz pianists, living or dead. There are quite long passages here that sound quite impossible and that surely can't have been invented on the spur of the moment. On the other hand, he does have a remarkable gift for a kind of lateral thinking that grabs you, so that you just have to keep hanging on to hear how things work out. And when he does calm down he can produce the most gorgeously sonorous, slow melodies. The originality outweighs the showing-off in the long run.