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NY Times 
Music Review - "Raising Roof and Headstone for Pioneering Pianist (James P. Johnson)"
Ben Ratliff
Published: October 6, 2009
...The evening’s revelation was Aaron Diehl, a pianist in his mid-20s who has played with Wynton Marsalis and Wycliffe Gordon. His style, on “Scaling the Blues,” “Over the Bars” and the second movement of Johnson’s “Jazzamine Concerto,” was modest, secure and insinuating, with an iron sense of time. A few different pianists worked in their own tunes as Johnson tributes; Mr. Diehl’s was a slow, gorgeous blues...
NY Times
MUSIC REVIEW
Pushing Back: Jazz Notes Against the Current
By Ben Ratliff
Published: January 20, 2010
Photographs by Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Mr. Diehl played works by Ellington, Shearing and Mozart.
The young pianist Aaron Diehl is putting his talent against the odds. What he’s up to with his trio, which played at Smalls on Tuesday night isn’t new in the temporal sense or “new” in the art-movement sense, which is to say it isn’t confrontational or puzzling.
It was a set that sounded as if it had arrived in a time capsule from before the 1960s game changers of jazz piano, Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner, and that’s strange coming from a musician in his mid-20s. It was clean, delicate, highly arranged and not outwardly virtuosic. In some ways, perhaps, he wasn’t pleading his case.
But that made you listen a bit harder. In his trio, with the bassist David Wong and the drummer Quincy Davis, you can recognize how much he’s studied, but he doesn’t feed his hard work back to you with any stress. He likes chamber dynamics. You hear a lot of Duke Ellington, particularly the quiet Ellington of the record “Piano Reflections.” You hear a lot of John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet. (The trio played a version of the quartet’s 10-minute “Ronde Suite” in its entirety — this in tiny Smalls, on a Tuesday night, at 7:30.) You also hear a little bit of stride piano, a style he doesn’t use often enough to make it a parlor trick or a crutch. And you’re also struck by more general qualities: the music’s counterintuitive combination of hard swing and restraint, Mr. Diehl’s careful keyboard touch, and space, lots of space.
He started with Ellington’s “Sucrier Velours,” from “The Queen’s Suite,” moved through George Shearing’s “Conception,” and then the band played its version of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A, organized into a jazz waltz. It had a question-and-answer structure running through it, as did Mr. Diehl’s own song “Tag You’re It,” which also included an agitated, race-away drum solo and a close tangle between piano and drums. A version of Thelonius Monk's " ‘Round Midnight” was the lightest of the soufflés: the rowdiest it got was Mr. Davis tapping his ride cymbal in a habanera beat during the song’s bridge. Everything had its calm place; nothing, structurally, was left to chance.
The trumpeter Dominick Farinacci joined the band at the end of the set, and in Monk’s “Four in One” the music got a little more muscled. Mr. Farinacci is a clear, declarative, forceful player, and the two musicians went at it without a rhythm section for a while. Mr. Diehl had to hit the keys a little harder and more percussively too. And when Mr. Farinacci soloed, Mr. Diehl accompanied, leaving fabulous acres of silence between chords.
More acclaim:
"The evening's revelation was Aaron Diehl... His style...was modest, secure and insinuating, with an iron sense of time."
- The New York Times
“Aaron Diehl acquitted himself as one of the most promising discoveries [Wynton] Marsalis has made since Eric Reed.”
- The Chicago Tribune
“Diehl—who dazzled audiences with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra as well as the Columbus Jazz Orchestra and Columbus Youth Jazz Orchestra—has the chops and the inclination.”
- The Columbus Dispatch
“Young Phenom.”
- Jazz at Lincoln Center
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