Breaking News!

Billy Lester Solo Jazz Piano
at Soapbox Gallery

Saturday, September 27, 2025
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Soapbox Gallery - 636 Dean Street Brooklyn, NY, 11238 United States

Click the link for more information
https://www.soapboxgallery.org/events/billy-lester-solo-jazz-piano-at-soapbox-gallery

Please take a listen to my new album HIGH STANDARDS on Spotify, Youtube, Amazon Music & Apple Music!

Album Review: HIGH STANDARDS (The Billy Lester Trio)

by TONY FRANKEL on  JULY 29, 2025

in CD-DVD

STANDARDS, UNSTANDARDIZED

With High Standards, pianist Billy Lester reminds us that reinvention isn’t just possible in jazz — it’s the point. You may not need high standards to listen to this joy-filled album, but you will certainly have high standards after! Joined by bassist Marcello Testaand drummer Nicola Stranieri, Lester plunges into the American songbook not to pay homage but to interrogate it, dismantle it, and rebuild it on his own terms. This is no polite stroll through familiar melodies. Instead, each track becomes a high-wire act of improvisation, exhilarating in its spontaneity and fearless in its abstraction.

Listeners familiar with Lester’s lineage — he was a protégé of Sal Mosca, and by extension Lennie Tristano — will recognize the deep commitment to improvisation that’s less about showing off and more about searching. Here, standards like “There Will Never Be Another You” and “Just Friends” are pushed to their harmonic edges. The melodies are not introduced outright, so those who don’t know the original standards should listen intently — phrases float in and out, sometimes emerging like fragments in a dream, sometimes vanishing altogether beneath a driving, unpredictable pulse.

“What Is This Thing Called Love” becomes a noirish riddle, cloaked in uncertainty and tension. “You Go to My Head” isn’t a wistful ballad but a slow-motion reverie — hypnotic, exploratory, and emotionally raw. Even uptempo burners like “I’ll Remember April” and “Lover, Come Back to Me” are given fresh life through daring phrasing, rhythmic displacement, and harmonic curveballs that feel less like departures and more like alternative routes through the tune’s DNA.

The rhythm section, far from just keeping time, is an equal partner in the adventure. Testa and Stranieri are nimble, intuitive, and unshakable — able to follow Lester through any turn without losing momentum or clarity. Together, the trio creates music that feels like a conversation mid-thought, fluid and unfinished in the best sense.

The album’s final track is pure Lester: a free improvisation that feels at once composed and entirely of the moment. It’s a fitting close to a record that never settles for the obvious. For newcomers, High Standards is a perfect entry point into Lester’s singular style. For longtime listeners, it’s another chapter in the career of a pianist who refuses to play it safe—and is all the more exciting for it.

★★★★★ (Highly Recommended)

https://stageandcinema.com/2025/07/29/billy-lester-trio-high-standards/