Full Tilt by Adam Shulman

This dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker didn’t know Adam Shulman from Adam, pardon the bad joke, when the 38-year-old, Bay Area based pianist emailed to assess my interest in writing the liner notes for his fifth CD. As a sample of his bona fides, he attached “Fantasy In D Flat,” a hard-swinging contrafact of Cedar Walton’s “Fantasy in D,” known as “Ugetsu” when Art Blakey introduced it as the title track of a 1963 album for Riverside by his great Jazz Messengers sextet with Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, Walton and Reggie Workman. On this version, which opens Full Tilt, each protagonist—trumpeter Mike Olmos, alto saxophonist Lyle Link, tenor saxophonist Patrick Wolff, and Shulman, whose own declamation evokes Walton in full flight—blows melodic, eloquent lines in their respective argots, displaying their commitment to meeting bebop on its own terms of engagement, to practice it as a lifestyle, and not a flirtation.

I emailed back that if “Fantasy In D-Flat” was indicative of the entire album, it would be my honor to take on the challenge.

I was even more impressed when Shulman sent me the eight remaining selections. The well-crafted horn parts on each chart, sophisticated, elegant and visceral, reveal a master of the art of combo arranging, sufficiently intimate with the respective canons of Walton, Horace Silver, Benny Golson and Gigi Gryce to apply their devices with his own voice, towards his own aesthetic ends. Although Shulman doesn’t particularly use the tunes as vehicles to showcase himself, his pianistic chops match his prowess with the pen—he uncorks a series of fresh, lucid, soulful declamations in dialects spanning Bud Powell to Bobby Timmons to Kenny Kirkland to Benny Green..

“I’ve come to see bebop and hardbop as my musical personality,” Shulman says. “I like the intelligence. I like the freedom within constraints. My music and the music that I admire so much can be dense and harmonically challenging. Hearing people blow over it, weave lines through these difficult, thorny changes really appeals to me. It tickles my intellect and it feels so good. The music from that era touches on so many parts of human expression—the gut feeling of swing matched with this heady intellectual thing.”

A native San Franciscan, Shulman, who began classical lessons at 7, began playing and listening seriously to jazz in high school. He continued to dual-track stylistically while earning a degree in classical performance at University of California, Santa Cruz. “I’ve been interested in writing ever since I started playing,” he says. “I’ve always been attracted to how things work, using the basic building blocks of harmony and reconfiguring them.”

During Shulman’s years at Santa Cruz, the late pianist Smith Dobson, his primary mentor, introduced him to post Bud Powell bebop pianists like Barry Harris and Sonny Clark. After returning to San Francisco in 2002, Shulman gravitated to a generational peer group—including most of the protagonists on Full Tilt—in synch with his determination to pursue individuality through the streams of hardcore jazz.

The breadth of Shulman’s skill sets raises the question why, as he puts it, “I am not a well-known entity in the jazz world,” at least outside the Bay Area, where he been a first-call sideman for years, most famously with singer Paula West, but also with world-class bassist-composer Marcus Shelby. Gigs with his trio and the sextet heard herein are increasingly frequent, and Shulman plays several nights a week on sessions at San Francisco’s Club Deluxe led by Olmos and Wolff, exceptional stylists, as well as the polymath Smith Dobson V.

Shulman offers a clue to his relative obscurity in his program notes for the superb, self-released nine-tune homage to Billy Strayhorn, Strays, a 2010 project. “So many incredible musicians throughout the history of jazz don’t get the attention and credit they deserve because they are crowded out by the big personalities,” he wrote. “I would like...to celebrate those who quietly and consistently create great music with no thought of fame and notoriety... Billy Strayhorn...exemplifies the spirit of the craftsperson whose work is what stands for who they are, and not the edifice of their personality.”

Without comparing Shulman’s corpus to Strayhorn’s, and whether or not Shulman’s remarks are self-descriptive, the sentiments he expresses ring true. It’s time for this luminous tonal personality to emerge from the shadows; if affixing my name to this excellent CD abets that process, I’ll be delighted.

Ted Panken

Adam Shulman has been a staple of the SF Jazz scene since 2002. He is a sideman playing with countless bay area musicians and vocalists. He has performed internationally with numerous renowned artists. In addition to his sideman work, Adam is a composer and arranger. He has released 4 albums of original music under his name and is the arranger for the jazz and cabaret singer Paula West.