The Thing about Joe Sullivan

The pianist Joe Sullivan, jamming sound against idea hard as it can go florid and dangerous slams at the beat, or hovers, drumming, along its spikes; in his time almost the only one of them to ignore the chance of easing down, walking it leisurely, he’ll strut, with gambling shapes, underpinning by James P., amble, and stride over gulfs of his own leaving, perilously toppling octaves down to where the chords grow fat again and ride hard-edged, most lucidly voiced, and in good inversions even when the piano seems at risk of being hammered the next second into scrap. For all that, he won’t swing like all the others; disregards mere continuity, the snakecharming business, the ‘masturbator’s rhythm’ under the long variations: Sullivan can gut a sequence in one chorus— —approach, development, climax, discard— and sound magnanimous. The mannerism of intensity often with him seems true, too much to be said, the mood pressing in right at the start, then running among stock forms that could play themselves and moving there with such quickness of intellect that shapes flaw and fuse, altering without much sign, concentration so wrapped up in thoroughness it can sound bluff, bustling, just big-handed stuff— belied by what drives him in to make rigid, display, shout and abscond, rather than just let it come, let it go— And that thing is his mood: a feeling violent and ordinary that runs in among standard forms so wrapped up in clarity that fingers following his through figures that sound obvious find corners everywhere, marks of invention, wakefulness; the rapid and perverse tracks that ordinary feelings make when they get driven hard enough against time.