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Pianist & composer Aaron Parks expands his trio with bassist Ben Street & drummer Billy Hart into a quartet with the addition of tenor saxophonist Ben Solomon to explore a new color palette on his luminous 3rd Blue Note album By All Means. Although Parks has made his band Little Big the center of his recorded output in recent years, he never stopped writing music that belonged to a different harmonic universe influenced by the likes of Wayne Shorter, Kenny Wheeler, Horace Silver, Duke Ellington, Joe Henderson, Kurt Rosenwinkel and others. By All Means presents seven new Parks original compositions including poignant dedications to his wife & son. — (via Label)

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In the spring of 2023, while on tour in Portugal, Aaron Parks had a dream. It concerned an upcoming week of shows at the Village Vanguard, where he was scheduled that July to play alongside the bassist Ben Street and drummer Billy Hart. The trio had been intermittently active since 2012, although the bonds between them ran far deeper than a decade of occasional gigs might suggest.

That morning, Parks awoke to a vivid feeling: he should add a saxophonist to the mix, expanding the group to a quartet. Bringing in a horn player would broaden the color palette and give Parks more space to explore another dimension of the conversation he’d been building over the years with Street and Hart. He could give himself over more fully to the rhythm of the rhythm section, serving the song not as its primary center of attention—as the piano often is experienced in the classic trio format—but rather as one of the hosts, comping for another soloist, focused on making the thing feel good from the inside out. 

You’ll hear what he had in mind on "Anywhere Together", a jostling, rambunctious swinger he wrote as a teenager. It’s there, too, in the warm, embracing contours of "Dense Phantasy". The whole record pulses with a kind of relational time that’s too alive for a grid—a supportive, elastic way of moving together. Even in the ethereal space of the rubato opener, "A Way", there’s an undercurrent of propulsion, shaped by Street and Hart’s supple, deeply attuned playing. The time bends, but dances. 

By All Means is a record that Parks decided to make on the fly. It’s the fruit of a dream, and as such is a submission to the wisdom of the unconscious self. Yet it’s also the harvest of decades of friendships and artistic investment, as well as Parks’s slow and meticulous (obsessive even) compositional process, with many details weighed, tested, and revised over the years. The result is both luminous and surreal, constructed with the care of a jeweler setting a diamond, yet receptive to the direction of a light breeze. The chemistry of the quartet that week was so compelling that in the middle of the run, Parks decided to try and capture it. A last-minute live recording session at the Vanguard wasn’t possible, so Parks secured a two-day window at Andy Taub’s Brooklyn Recording studio in Cobble Hill, just five miles south of the club.

Aaron’s compositions on By All Means are dense with ideas, melodies that lodge themselves in your brain for weeks, and harmonic turns that aim at the heart while sidestepping the usual sentimental routines. There are songs for his family: a gentle, searching dance for his wife ("For María José"), a restless lullaby in three for his son Lucas ("Little River"), and one for himself, "Parks Lope", an off-kilter medium swing loaded with curious turns whose title embeds a bit of a dad joke as well a reference to his distinctively uneven gait. It is an album which draws upon many, if not all, of Aaron’s available means. Which, to speak of him alone, are downright excessive. He is an artist of profound intellect and technical facility, intensely engaged, emotionally curious to a degree that verges on a liability.— (via Lauren Du Graf, Label)

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The 1960 Reid Miles-like typography on the sleeve art of Seattle native pianist Aaron Parks’ third Blue Note release By All Means – perhaps in emulation of Jackie McLean’s It’s Time – gives a clue as to Aaron Parks’ tip of the hat to the bygone modernist jazz era.

Parks, who’s known for his forward-thinking post-jazz Little Big ensemble and the co-led SF band James Farm starring Joshua Redman, corrects any perceived misinterpretations of his intentions in the album’s PR blurb: “It’s not about nostalgia or preservation. It’s about being alive within that lineage, that continuum”.