‘Playground’: Michel Petrucciani Experiments On Blue Note
Petrucciani later said he loved the way the album brought a ‘Miles Davisian color to my music.’
Michel Petrucciani’s penultimate album for Blue Note Records, Playground, was one he particularly treasured. “It had more rhythm, more percussion, more synthesizer, and quite suggestive melodies,” he said. “It made me rediscover the love I have for jazz and its beautiful, harmonically complex ballads.” The album, like 1988’s Michel Plays Petrucciani, was created at New York’s Clinton Recording Studios, where work began on March 14, 1991. Petrucciani played piano and synthesizers on Playground, and wrote 10 of the 11 featured tracks.
“Laws of Physics,” the sole non-Petrucciani tune, was composed by synthesizer player Adam Holzman, who played a key role in shaping the sound of the album as the co-arranger of Playground. Holzman had recently finished working with Miles Davis (he had been his musical director for a time) and said he was partly attracted to working with Petrucciani because “I was going to be a little more integral to what Michel was doing compared to Miles… and he gave me a chance to expand not only as a player but as a writer. Michel’s concept was to have a standard jazz piano format with synthesizer orchestration. It was just too interesting to pass up.”
Listen to Michel Petrucciani’s Playground now.
Petrucciani said he had been “very influenced” by the sound Davis and Holzman had created on their album Tutu and had decided he wanted to do “something electric.” The addition of synthesizers and electric bass guitar in the ensemble created a more funk-rhythm sound. So did the atmospheric drumming of Omar Hakim, a musician voted best electric percussionist in a 1980s Modern Drummer magazine poll. Hakim mixed perfectly with bassist Anthony Jackson, a player credited with the development of the modern six-string bass. Petrucciani was a fan of his work with Davis and the pianist said he specifically wrote some of the tunes for Jackson because “I know the way they play… how he enjoys doing the chord changes.”
Petrucciani said that some of the tunes for Playground were written “in a hurry,” during a difficult period in his life when he was “drinking a lot of vodka” and watching reports of the Gulf War on television. Nonetheless, the tender “Rachid,” written in honor of his stepson, and the live favorite “Miles Davis’ Licks” were career highlights. Playground reached the top 10 of Billboard’s Jazz Album chart after it was released on June 6, 1991. Although Petrucciani went on to record the solo acoustic piano tribute album to Duke Ellington (Promenade with Duke) next, he remained pleased with Playground and the way it brought a “Miles Davisian color to my music.”
Three years after the success of Playground, Petrucciani was made a knight of the Legion of Honor in Paris. Even after leaving Blue Note, he remained busy, often performing more than 100 concerts per year up to his death in 1999 at the age of 36. He always said that he enjoyed living in a rush (“I hate wasting time,” he remarked) but ultimately he left a distinguished body of music, including the energetic and moving Playground.
