Clara Ponty
Clara Ponty
Philips 314 536 155-2 (1997) Rating:

I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but a photo of Clara Ponty’s new album on the internet caught my eye immediately. Whoa! To these eyes, she has a stunning, European type of beauty that, on many women, you imagine is only superficial at best. As I expected, though, Clara’s beauty is way more than skin deep; the beauty she creates with her music touches the soul.

By now, you may have surmised that pianist and composer Clara Ponty has a familiar last name. Her father is jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. Given her father’s choice of career, and having grown up in Paris and Los Angeles because of it, Clara’s touch has a strong European influence to it, with a type of artistic freedom that one could only experience in America. And I do detect subtle hints of Jean-Luc’s musical stylings in her compositions, as well as a few Claude Debussy influences.

Clara Ponty penned all of these tunes herself, except for the disc opener, “Romance,” which she collaborated on with her father. Reading her notes to these songs is required reading. For “Romance”, she says, “A collaboration with my father. Like moonlight drawn into a dark leaf, creating a new form, love.” For “Jeux d’Oiseaux”, “A game played among birds. This piece captures a moment of pure joyousness.” And for “Glimpses of Paradise, she explains…”An impressionistic moment; passing through a prism, a falling spectrum of colors.”

Clara’s songs are more like paintings than anything else I can think of (and I hate to use that tired cliché, but it’s appropriate). She paints aural pictures. Her music is technically filed under “new age”, but unlike many of that genre, she has more than one color on her palette and therefore does not fall into the dreaded “yuppie Muzak” rut that many Windham Hill acts fell prey to over the years. For each moment of lightness and color, there is another of darkness. For moments of fun and playfulness, there are others of trance-like, meditative states (“Sunrise Prayer”) and “Melancholy.”

But much of this music defies description. Beside a hint of percussion on a couple of tracks, this is completely unadorned solo piano. I can tell this one is going to be in my CD deck for awhile, providing solace in this crazy world we live in. And yet, I cannot give her five stars for this album; this is her first project, and with her obvious talent for composing and performing, she’s bound to get even better.