The nine originals that comprise Here And Now reveal Chicago-based pianist Ryan Cohan to be a gifted if still slightly derivative post-bop compositional personality. Deeply rooted in the major Blue Note food groups, Cohan has internalized their rhythmic DNA, permitting him the freedom to weave well-traveled ideas into cohesive, detailed, and multithematic musical shapes that for the most part transcend the references that gave them birth. Already a master at three-horn writing, Cohan deploys his excellent front men---only Bob Sheppard, an Origin alumnus, has a reputation outside of Chicago---in a variety of configurations, and lets them dig into a series of sophisticated voicings from which they springboard with a set of unfailingly lyric solos. Cohan himself is a strong pianist from the Bud Powell-Herbie Hancock-Chick Corea tree, and his bass-drum team of James Cammack, the Ahmad Jamal veteran, and trapsetter Dana Hall, articulate the beats with requisite precision of touch and looseness of feel.---Ted Panken

The Ryan Cohan Quartet is traveling from Chicago to Medicine Hat to make its only Canadian Jazz Festival appearance for this season. Ryan is a young pianist with the talent of a seasoned veteran.
    Ryan graduated from the DePaul School of Music in Chicago in 1993 He then studied with arranger Cliff Colnot and improvisation instructor David Bloom. He has been performing on the Chicago scene for nearly a decade with such notables as Freddie Hubbard, Regina Carter and Richie Cole.
    Ryan was employed by Ramsey Lewis to write for two recent releases, Dance of the Souls and Appassionata.
    Here and Now is Ryan's debut album, as leader, composer and arranger. Ryan's writing is strong. Any one of these tunes could be mistaken for part of the standard jazz repertoire. Ryan's intention was to create pieces that would inspire and form the framework for strong improvisation.
    The combination of arranged lines and ensemble work, with open improvisation sections is seamless. There are rhythmically interesting, constantly shifting time feels. The arrangements flow, but never remain static. Strong Latin roots lie at the heart of several of the arrangements, but Ryan's group always has that underlying sense of swing that is the hallmark of good jazz.
    There are also tunes on this 2000 release, like Looking glass, that are more like tone poems, gentle and reflective in nature. The smooth, logically conceived melody does not allude to the highly sophisticated chord progression that underlies its effortless flow.
    Other tunes like Urgent Identity are more modally based.
    One of the major players on Ryan's CD is Los Angeles based saxophonist Bob Sheppard, who has played with, among others, Chick Corea's band Origin. Bob says that Ryan has a vision for the future. He says his textures and sonorities are extremely sophisticated, yet accessible. He says it was a challenge to learn the music, and yet this recording provided the kind of creative situation he wished would happen more often.
    As a player, Ryan has all the goods. His improvisation is incredibly strong. He has terrific technique, yet chooses to use it only in services of the music. He is also very ready to step aside and let his fellow musicians shine, comping and supporting them.
    Ryan Cohan and his quartet will be performing two nights at JazzFest, Friday June 25 and Saturday, June 26. Both performances start at 10:30 PM in the Cultural Centre Black Box Theatre. Joining Ryan for his Medicine Hat appearances will be Lorin Cohen on bass, Geof Bradfield on sax and Kobie Watkins on drums. Ryan will also be giving a workshop Friday, June 25 at 4 PM in the Cultural Centre Black Box Theatre.
-- Lyle Rebbeck

Ryan Cohan is unknown here, but this brilliant debut album can change all that. Elements of local hero Herbie Hancock can be heard in his playing, but this gifted Chicagoan pianist-composer is definitely his own man. All ten of these complex, yet soulful pieces carry Cohan's personal stamp, and, while you won't be whistling any of them on the way to work the next day, they do have that grow-on-you factor.
    His line ups, various sextets drawn from a pool of 12 session men, feature trumpeter Tito Carrillo, Bob Sheppard on flute and saxes, bassist James Cammack and drummer Dana Hall. Expert all-rounders, they solo well and their collective musicianship is awesome. While packing the solid rhythmic punch and loose-limbed spontaneity essential to jazz, there's also a phenomenal precision to their ensemble work. Each track sounds rehearsed to the smallest nuance, though one suspects that these dudes ambled into the studio and sight-read the lot in first takes. Recommended to lovers of classical music who want to get their jazz feet wet, this is a quality album in every respect. It was recorded in Chicago, but produced by John Preistley's admirable little label in leafy downtown Altrincham. Somebody on the Arts Council (and not necessarily a Manchester United fan) should speak to them about Ryan gigs.

If you played the CD before reading these notes, and therefore came to Here And Now like I did, cold, then I suspect that you are in for a series of surprises. The first Is that you have been listening to a sextet. Ryan Cohan's arrangements create such density and scale that six instruments sound like a little big band. The next is that you have not been listening to a band that has played together for years (as the impeccable execution would suggest), but to a group of musicians mostly from Chicago, only a few of them well known, who were brought together for this record. The next surprise is that none of these tunes is a standard. None has previously existed in the jazz repertoire. They are all Ryan Cohan originals. The reason they sound elusively familiar is not that they are derivative. It is that Cohan's gift for melody invents lines that resonate in the mind with such inevitability that you think you've heard them before.
    The following selection of personal favorite experiences in this music is offered In the confidence that you will find many of your own:
    "Too Soon" is atypical of a Cohan composition in that its opening idea is explicitly based on the work of another writer. The first eight bars of Kenny Kirkland's "Dienda" inspired "Too Soon," but its development is fully representative of the Cohan aesthetic. This tribute to a gifted pianist (who died too young in 1999) begins almost in a whisper, drummer Dana Hall's soulful patterns leading to a crystalline piano interlude. The theme is painted in pastel Cohan colors, a blend of Jim Gailloreto's flute at the top, Tito Carrillo's flugelhorn in the middle, and Geof Bradfield's tenor saxophone at the bottom. Cohan gets that big sound from three horns through creative manipulation of intervals and trills, beginning with tight voicings and then suddenly opening them out. Cohan's piano and then Carrillo's muted trumpet explore outside the boundaries of the song without ever leaving its purpose. The theme is restated in an ensemble blend made brighter by Geof Bradfield's switch to soprano saxophone. Cohan's piano is sewn though these textures like a bright thread of intelligence, emerging alone for tantalizing moments before the song recedes. The technical expertise here serves meaning, which is truthfulness to a mood, a gradual revelation of a particular landscape of feeling.
    Of "Looking Glass," Cohan says, "I like to take certain elements from one section of a piece and infuse them into the next section. There's a figure that moves down in different intervals that represents the introspection of a pensive gaze into a mirror." The first section, "Prelude," reveals that Cohan the pianist is one of Cohan the composer's strongest interpreters. Even when the ensemble, led by Bob Sheppard's ethereal flute, joins and fills the foreground, the piano forays of "Looking Glass" carry on and never stop searching inward.
    A piece that shares the atmosphere of "Looking Glass" is "Haunted," and it too takes its light and its shadow from Cohan's piano. His touch on the keyboard makes each note hang in the air like a quiet cry. He says, "I like to dig deep into the sounds and colors of a mood like this one and what I come upon is often dark. But I always like to come out at the end with hope. That's what those harmonies at the end are about."
    The album closes with a fiercely concentrated piece called "Urgent Identity." Cohan explains, "I wanted to provide a good vehicle for blowing. The head has some fairly intricate rhythmic stuff, but for the blowing I wanted to open it up and say "Here we go." Cohan goes first and he takes off and flies. Carrillo goes just as hard, cracking and flaring around the core of the theme. Cohan says, "This piece including the title came out of conversations with James Cammack, whose work on bass is so important to this album. I met Jim when I was 22 or 23. The first time I heard him, playing electric bass with Ahmad Jamal, he just knocked me out because he played with such intensity. He gave me a perspective on how to dig in when I play. When Jim would tell me about musicians who inspire him he would talk about that edge, that urgency. We talked so much, trying to articulate what that thing is--that urgency, which is always there, inherent. The title, 'Urgent Identity'--that is Cammack's personality. He is on fire twenty hours a day."
Cohan states, perhaps not yet fully prepared to accept that he is not only describing personalities like James Cammack but also himself, "I want to be around people with passion, people with an urgency to express, an urgency to be."---Thomas Conrad, Downbeat, Stereophile