Detours is "Blue" Gene Tyranny's first album of new piano works since 2003's Take Your Time. A beautifully recorded collection of tracks composed between 2004 and 2010, Detours belongs to a rarefied class of supremely listenable and beautiful piano albums that are not encumbered by any new-age shabbiness. It possesses the sort of timeless and elegant romanticism so unpretentious and accomplished it seems to at once effortlessly canonize itself.
The four pieces on Detours have their origins in disparate sources of inspiration - a longtime friend in San Francisco, a chance visit to a Quaker meetinghouse, a choreographed dance, philosophical intuition. Harmonic discourses begin at a pre-determined location and wind up at a totally unexpected place. Tyranny is a master pianist, able to follow mood and impulse to uncharted new territory.
Press
"It's been eight years since an album of his new work, and about half of 'Detours,' his new album on Unseen Worlds, is prime stuff, including two major solo-piano pieces: '13 Detours' and 'George Fox Searches.' He does not stint on beautiful things - major arpeggios, soul-chord progressions, lines that flow and breathe - and his keyboard touch is rounded and gorgeous, a feeling you remember." - The New York Times
"All week, 'George Fox Searches' has had me humming a Baptist hymn, replete with Tyranny's improvisatory embellishments. As recently as 2010 his former bandmate Iggy Pop was still stage diving into his early 60s, and the same time, "Blue" Gene Tyranny was taking his own leaps into the unknown, albeit with far less chance of bodily harm. Fifty years after a San Antonio teen skipped out on Julliard, a veteran continues to thumb his nose at convention, still seeking, still striving." - Dusted
Detours is "Blue" Gene Tyranny's first album of new piano works since 2003's Take Your Time. A beautifully recorded collection of tracks composed between 2004 and 2010, Detours belongs to a rarefied class of supremely listenable and beautiful piano albums that are not encumbered by any new-age shabbiness. It possesses the sort of timeless and elegant romanticism so unpretentious and accomplished it seems to at once effortlessly canonize itself.
The four pieces on Detours have their origins in disparate sources of inspiration - a longtime friend in San Francisco, a chance visit to a Quaker meetinghouse, a choreographed dance, philosophical intuition. Harmonic discourses begin at a pre-determined location and wind up at a totally unexpected place. Tyranny is a master pianist, able to follow mood and impulse to uncharted new territory.
Press
"It's been eight years since an album of his new work, and about half of 'Detours,' his new album on Unseen Worlds, is prime stuff, including two major solo-piano pieces: '13 Detours' and 'George Fox Searches.' He does not stint on beautiful things - major arpeggios, soul-chord progressions, lines that flow and breathe - and his keyboard touch is rounded and gorgeous, a feeling you remember." - The New York Times
"All week, 'George Fox Searches' has had me humming a Baptist hymn, replete with Tyranny's improvisatory embellishments. As recently as 2010 his former bandmate Iggy Pop was still stage diving into his early 60s, and the same time, "Blue" Gene Tyranny was taking his own leaps into the unknown, albeit with far less chance of bodily harm. Fifty years after a San Antonio teen skipped out on Julliard, a veteran continues to thumb his nose at convention, still seeking, still striving." - Dusted
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Liner Notes
TRUST IN ROCK: An Interview with "Blue" Gene Tyranny and Peter Gordon by Ned Sublette
42 years after Trust in Rock, we got together in February 2018 to talk about it.