Davis produced the album and pushed Rogers to go solo, pulling her out of the ensemble world she was used to. That’s a different kind of nakedness, and what Rogers did with that exposure is striking.
Pyroclastic Records
Yvonne Rogers – piano
Somewhere between the woods of rural Maine and a Brooklyn apartment, Yvonne Rogers figured out how to press the joy of the natural world into sound, and hand it to the listener. She grew up without television, with pine trees and open sky for company. “You sense that the world goes on without you,” she says, “so the problems in your head don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. I want my music to do that for other people – to create a space for them to experience this feeling of wonder so that they can get out of their head for a few minutes.” Rogers’ debut solo piano album, The Button Jar, is where that begins to happen.
The album takes its name from a jar of buttons Rogers’ artist mother kept for craft projects — a stockpile of ordinary things that could become anything. It’s a good image for how the music works. These fourteen pieces started as short explorations Rogers posted to social media, never intending them to outlast the scroll. It took Pyroclastic founder Kris Davis, who heard something worth preserving, to convince her otherwise.
As a solo pianist, Rogers is her own kind of animal — Bill Evans’ impressionist washes, Chick Corea’s crystalline precision are useful landmarks, but she’s working from a different set of instincts. “I think texturally rather than harmonically,” she says, and you can hear it — each piece following its own interior logic, shaped by how sounds feel against each other rather than where the chords want to go. “I would rather play something I really don’t like than something I think is boring.” Nothing here is boring.
“Luster” opens things slowly, the left hand holding spare open chords while the right traces a quiet repeating phrase, occasionally reaching higher. The title track arrives with more angular urgency. The delicate counterpoint of “Scatter and Sort” follows — the left hand sets something down, the right picks it up and walks off with it. “Thread the Needle” barely touches the keys, notes placed so carefully they seem afraid to land too hard, something half-remembered and played with the tenderness of things almost lost. “Linear Gel” — an anagram of formative influence Geri Allen — is a different world entirely, both hands bouncing along like two melodies chasing each other around the room, until the lower notes deepen and the whole thing grows more complex than it first let on.
Three pieces are freely improvised. “Avid Risks,” a dedication to Kris Davis whose name it scrambles, sets the left hand growling against swirling runs in the upper register, quieting and then picking back up again. Album closer “Exhale” is the still point at the end of it all — both hands placing notes slowly, deliberately, like something delicate being set down carefully in a quiet room.
Davis produced the album and pushed Rogers to go solo, pulling her out of the ensemble world she was used to. That’s a different kind of nakedness, and what Rogers did with that exposure is striking. Alone at the piano, her textural rather than harmonic instinct turns out to be more than enough.
