Marc-André Hamelin

Pianist Marc-André Hamelin lives in an 88-key utopia where every obligatory Liszt or Schumann album he records is followed by one spotlighting a forgotten chap like Adolf von Henselt or Joseph Marx. We know Evgeny Kissin will record another Chopin disc; Jonathan Biss, another Beethoven. But this mellow Montreal native is almost impossible to pigeonhole. His latest release on Hyperion, In a State of Jazz, digs up cryptic works from the likes of Friedrich Gulda and Nikolai Kapustin, and convinces us they’re precious gems.

This isn’t a “jazz” record, but rather a wonderful grab bag of notated classical works inflected with jazzy flourishes and harmonies. You can hear thickly chorded, jumpin’ Bolcom rags in Gulda’s Exercise No. 4 from Play Piano Play, while in the second movement of Kapustin’s mercurial Sonata No. 2, it sounds as if its cascading waterfalls could mutate at any moment into Vince Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown staple, Skating.

The centerpiece is brilliant Bulgarian pianist Alexis Weissenberg’s “Sonata in a State of Jazz,” which edges closer to academia than Art Tatum. Yet the grave beauty in the must-hear third movement elevates this work above everything else on the record. There’s even some tenderly crafted melodic material to grab onto in Weissenberg’s sing-songy “Coin de rue,” and Hamelin appropriately wigs out in George Antheil’s freakishly amusing, 90-second Jazz Sonata. For all his enviable technique, it’s Hamelin’s rhythmic instinct that really propels this disc forward.