Flip the Script

Since emerging in the '90s, Philadelphia-rooted pianist and composer Orrin Evans has been a sideman to several artists (including Bobby Watson and Ralph Peterson), cut a number of albums as a leader, and more recently has helmed The Captain Black Big Band. Evans generally works in a straight-ahead, post-bop mode, and he’s very good at what he does. On 2012’s Flip the Script, he plays with a trio that includes bassist Ben Wolfe and Donald Edwards. Most of the tracks are four or five minutes long, and they’re generous with melody. The album opens with “Question,” a piece written by bassist Eric Revis that has a touch of Monk in it. The band swings hard and also embraces edgy abstraction, effortlessly erasing differences between playing in and out. Evans displays a big sound on “Clean House,” while a cover of Luther Vandross’s “A Brand New Day” evokes McCoy Tyner. A lovely Evans original, “The Answer,” precedes a slow, solo-piano version of Gamble and Huff’s “The Sound of Philadelphia.” Evans slows the latter song way down, and the result is a superb inner-city-blues rendering of the R&B classic.