Find the Way is the second ECM album by the American pianist Aaron Parks, and the first with a trio. After the solo Arborescence, he turned to bassist Ben Street and drummer Billy Hart, a rhythm pair that also plays together in Hart's own quartet on the label. Parks describes their blend of fluidity and strength as "oceanic", and the album is a piano trio record in the classic mould, built on melody and space rather than on solo display.
The three had already been working together for several years. They recorded in October 2015 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, in the south of France, with Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard as engineers and Manfred Eicher as producer. Parks names Alice Coltrane and Shirley Horn among the influences behind the music. Hart had played in Horn's group, so the link is first-hand. Eight of the nine pieces are Parks originals.
The opener, Adrift, sets out the album's manner, a melody-rich theme carried over Hart's rolling, melodic fills. Hold Music was written as a miniature drum feature for Hart, while Melquíades takes its name from a character in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Storyteller holds a melody that resolves and still leaves a sense of longing, as Nate Chinen observed for WBGO. The closing title track is the only cover, a song by Ian Bernard that Parks came to love on an LP by Rosemary Clooney and Nelson Riddle.
Critics heard the trio as a balanced unit. Cormac Larkin wrote in The Irish Times that Parks's "spacious, optimistic playing is like a shaft of sunlight in the dense forest of contemporary piano trios". In London Jazz News in 2017, Peter Bacon called it "one of the loveliest piano trio discs I expect to hear this year". Thomas Conrad, in The New York City Jazz Record, noted how Street's lines pull against the pianist's flow and how Hart's accents keep redirecting the energy. Roger Thomas, writing for BBC Music Magazine, found the record more forthright than expected from ECM and greater than the sum of its parts.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2489, first released on 21 April 2017.
