Louis Durra, Mood Music Review

by Jeff Becker

Musicians create a mood for the listener to live in the shape of the music. On Mood Music, pianist Louis Durra gives his music clear points of orientation while leaving considerable freedom in the spaces between them to set the mood. A melody establishes a theme,  rhythm creates feeling, and the ensemble moves to a destination. Between those points, harmony can take an unexpected route, meter can become elastic, and musicians can pursue independent lines before finding one another again.

This is the fragile balance that gives Mood Music its understated sophistication. The album is relaxed and immediately melodic, but accessibility can disguise how much is happening within its laidback mood. Durra lets familiar shapes absorb harmonic surprise, rhythmic displacement, ensemble interaction, and silence without losing their identities.

There is a personal history behind the music. The album was inspired partly by Durra’s memories of music his mother, Joan Durra, enjoyed. “Strangers in the Night,” her favorite song, provides the most direct connection, while other pieces draw on remembered places and experiences. Durra is channeling a memory to supply material that the present can transform.

“About the Same” moves within the core trio of Durra, bassist Domenic Genova, and drummer Jerry Kalaf. Its laid-back jazz and blues character gives the listener an immediate framework. Durra states the melody in light upper-register figures while inner voices and left-hand movement create another harmonic layer. Genova’s resonant bass alternates between foundation and melodic interaction, while Kalaf initially keeps the time light, using carefully placed ride-cymbal accents.

The performance gradually becomes more active. Genova begins walking, Kalaf incorporates more of the kit, and Durra digs further into blues language with larger intervals and harmonic approaches into chord tones. His solo develops toward an audible shape and feel. When Genova takes over, Kalaf moves to brushes and Durra reduces his accompaniment to sustained chords and pickups that clarify the next phrase. By the melody’s return, the trio has traveled considerably without making the original a central character.

“Hold Fast to Dreams” applies the same principle to harmony. Its melody is clear, unfolding through carefully voiced chords and deliberate space. The meter carries a relaxed waltz character that can also suggest a broader 6/8 motion. Against that accessibility, Durra introduces rising harmonic movement, passing tones, changes of texture, and cadences that arrive somewhere slightly different from where the ear anticipates.

The melody remains the anchor. Durra develops his solo from its contours, allowing harmonic variations to grow from material with patience and a relaxed expression. At one point, bass and drums fall away and the piano handles the melody rubato. When the trio returns, blues-inflected figures and more active rhythmic interaction alter the character again. Rubato, waltz motion, polyrhythm, and harmonic surprise can coexist because the composition never loses its direction.

“Gewitter” moves with a new motion, but with a similar mood. Middle-register piano voicings and an unusual scalar melody establish a darker, suspended atmosphere, while the trio begins playing with the time itself. Polyrhythms and metric shifts complicate the pulse. Durra’s left-hand figure supplies enough grounding for Genova and Kalaf to pursue increasingly independent rhythmic paths.

This is an example of where the trio’s listening is the foundation of setting a composition’s mood. Bass and drums do more than accompany the piano. They develop their own activity and then converge with Durra at phrase beginnings, endings, and other points of arrival. The performance expands and contracts through dynamics: activity gathers, swells, releases into space, and begins again.

Even here, the music does not become directionless. Durra allows the ear to anticipate where a phrase is headed while making the route toward that destination less predictable. The distinction is central to Mood Music: surprise exists inside orientation.

Space is therefore functional to the environment of the mood. A sustained chord clarifies an arrival. A pause separates structural events. Reduced accompaniment exposes the shape of a bass phrase. Silence gives an unexpected harmony greater consequence because there is room to hear what changed. Restraint does not reduce the music’s information; it clarifies the relationships within it.

That makes Durra’s idea of “the betweens” particularly useful. His emphasis on reacting to and resonating with other musicians is audible as more than conversational improvisation. The players do not need to occupy the same rhythmic or melodic space at every moment. They need enough shared orientation to know when they can separate and where they need to meet.

“Still Awake” demonstrates that idea outside the principal trio. The piece originated in the separate Looper Colony project and features guitarist Barry Coates with Durra and Kalaf. The instrumentation and recording context change, but the album’s underlying behavior remains.

Suspension governs the performance. Harmonic resolution is repeatedly suggested and delayed. Low-register material supplies weight while unexpected intervals enter above it, and Coates adds another color through spacious, reverberant guitar chords. Kalaf’s measured drum movement gives the increasingly dreamlike texture a sense of forward motion.

When resolution arrives, it takes a different harmonic route than the preceding material initially suggests. That makes “Still Awake” more than an atmospheric coda. Change the instrumentation, increase the suspension, and remove the conventional trio configuration, and Durra’s basic principle still works: the listener can sense direction without knowing exactly how the music will reach its destination.

That principle also survives when the album moves beyond the core trio. “Tidal River, Mendocino,” drawn from the separate Looper Colony project, brings Barry Coates’s guitar and Sam Riney’s tenor flute into Durra and Kalaf’s more spacious setting. The expanded instrumentation changes the color without breaking the album’s preference for openness: flute and guitar broaden the available melodic and textural space rather than crowding it. The piece functions as a transition from the tightly responsive piano-trio language toward the more atmospheric possibilities heard elsewhere on the record.

That makes the memories that inspired Mood Music especially fitting. Memory preserves outlines while details move. A melody, place, or feeling can remain recognizable even as its meaning changes with time. Durra approaches his compositions similarly: establish something clear enough to remember, then allow the present moment to change what happens around it.

Mood Music ultimately treats openness not as the absence of structure but as one of structure’s possibilities. Durra provides destinations without prescribing every route between them. Genova’s movement between foundation and countervoice, Kalaf’s ability to define or loosen the pulse, and the expanded colors of Coates’s guitar and Riney’s tenor flute all extend that freedom in different ways. Beneath the record’s calm surface, the musicians continually change the path while keeping the shape of the journey clear.