DOWNBEAT -- Released March 5, “Facets” is perhaps Modirzadeh’s most daring album. It not only features the retuning of a piano — an act, he said, that many academics liken to the sacrificing of a sacred cow — it presents the retuned instrument in solo and duo formats. That strategy leaves the piano, and the challenge to chromatic hegemony he is taking on by altering the instrument’s seemingly fixed set of half-tones. more exposed than on his previous albums. On them, the retuned pianos largely appear amid combos.
To meet the challenge, Modirzadeh, a longtime professor at San Francisco State University, flew east in 2018 and 2019 for separate recording sessions with pianists Craig Taborn, Tyshawn Sorey and Kris Davis. All make beautiful music playing pianos on which eight pitches are tuned down. The pitches cover an octave-and-a-half in the keyboard’s mid-to-upper register, precisely where a jazz pianist’s right hand tends to roam.