With Seventeen Pieces Boston pianist Pandelis Karayorgis turns in one of the most unusual solo piano recitals of recent years, a set of quizzical miniatures in which he plays cat and mouse with tunes by Lennie Tristano, Sun Ra, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington and Eric Dolphy, plus a couple standards and some ultra-oblique originals. Karayorgis’s touch is curiously finicky, the notes registering like tiny flecks, dots and flickers that he marshals into a delicately jumbled two-handed counterpoint. The results are rather like a Ran Blake album that’s been reduced to a heap of pebbles (Karayorgis, like Blake, loves to end pieces with a enigmatic anticlimax). The teasing, elusive nature of the music can sometimes verge on coyness, but there’s no doubt that Karayorgis is a true original: Seventeen Pieces is an album with the devious, glimmering weightlessness of a spiderweb.

Nate Dorward

Exclaim, May 2005