Denny Zeitlin and Charlie Haden: Ellen David

Track

Ellen David

Artist

Denny Zeitlin (piano) and Charlie Haden (bass)

CD

Time Remembers One Time Once (ECM 1239)

Buy Track

Musicians:

Denny Zeitlin (piano), Charlie Haden (bass).

Composed by Charlie Haden

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Recorded: Keystone Korner, San Francisco, July 1981

Denny_zeitlin-charlie_haden

Rating: 95/100 (learn more)

If Denny Zeitlin and Charlie Haden had played at Bradley’s, the well-remembered Greenwich Village haven for piano/bass duos, this is how they would have sounded. As is, this album memorably documents a reunion of Zeitlin and Haden for a week at San Francisco’s likewise well-remembered Keystone Korner.

“Ellen David” is Haden’s simple sixteen-bar ballad (with a coda at the end), a sort of latter-day “My Ideal”. The duo’s performance is appropriately spare, but it’s so well grounded that every beat has meaning. As the late bassist Red Mitchell aptly put it, “Simple isn’t easy.”

Reviewer: Bill Kirchner

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