AARON PARKS - By All Means

After the third record with Little Big and the collaboration with Dayna Stephens, the end of this 2025 sees Aaron Parks release "By All Means", together with an acoustic quartet working together for the first time, made up of Ben Street on bass, Billy Hart on drums and Ben Solomon on tenor sax.

As had already been announced in the interview for our site, the new record would be "a typical jazz album, the first in a long time". Listening to it, the description fits perfectly. Compared to the electronic, "post-genre" experiments with Little Big, "By All Means" marks a decisive return to the origins of the genre: acoustic instruments, themes left mainly to the tenor sax, a walking bass marking out the pressing jazz rhythm alongside the drums, solos and pianistic codas.

The album has a direct sound, in which complexity and immediacy find a perfect balance. Take "Parks Lope", the first single that preceded the record: the sax lays out the theme, giving the listener time to absorb it before diving into the solo, the crescendo, then there's room for the piano solo and the sax's return, with a slowing final section. A classic sound, timeless, clean and rigorous. And certainly not banal or simplistic. One limitation, perhaps, can be found in the lack of genuine surprises and moments of rupture, but looking at Parks's artistic and musical path, the very choice to set aside bolder experimentation and contamination with electronic music, rock and classical music can itself be seen as a surprise.

“By All Means” lends itself to both more intimate moments and more convivial ones, because the elegance and rigor of the compositions abstract well from context and leave room only for the music. Still, the mark of intimacy is what emerges when looking at the song titles: “For Maria José”, dedicated to his wife; “Little River”, for his son; and especially the closing “Raincoat”, in which the dialogue between piano and sax is deeply personal and emotional.

Parks has said that the idea for the album came to him in a dream, and that for this work he approached things from the perspective of being one member of the group, rather than a solo pianist. And indeed, it can be perceived as the work of a tight-knit quartet that worked on the music together. Even without experimentation or innovation, the skill of Aaron Parks and the musicians who collaborate with him time after time is all there.

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26/11/2025