With Prayer for What Remains, her first release since 2019, pianist Leslie Pintchik once again, with the assistance of her deeply connected bandmates, delivers engaging music notable as much for its intelligence as its emotional eloquence and scope.

Leslie Pintchik
Prayer for What Remains (Pinch Hard Records)
A review
Some music requires your attention, some commands it, but the music of pianist Leslie Pintchik simply delights your attention and pays it back in spades. Her latest album, Prayer for What Remains, finds her passing through a time of personal challenges—the pandemic, the death of her mother, an injury to her left hand (healed now)—and deepened by the experience. From the outset, her colleagues—Steve Wilson (soprano sax), Scott Hardy (bass), Michael Sarin (drums), and Satoshi Takeishi (percussion)—demonstrate an extraordinary sensitivity to the specific emotional tenor of each of Pintchik’s eight original compositions and her arrangements of Joni Mitchell’s “Banquet” and Lennon/McCartney’s “I Will.”

Pintchik moves through the painful feelings with an enviably fluid grace and a light but firm touch. The title track, which opens the album, finds Pintchik emerging from loss with an enlightening sense of gratitude. On “Later Than We Thought,” she urgently explores the anxiety of impermanence and unpredictability, ultimately dancing her way down a luminous samba avenue to acceptance. On “Grief,” she captures the ever-changing stages of that condition and, with gently suspended resolutions, the accommodation of its continual presence, with special assistance from Hardy’s bass solo. With her sensitive and subtly shifting harmonization, Pintchik reflects the multiple facets of these painful feelings and opens them to the light.

Despite her recent challenges, Pintchik has not lost her sense of humor or her mischievous sprightliness. “Request Denied!” paints a lively portrait of confounded disbelief, and the bouncing, angular head of the up-tempo “Over Easy,” tailor-made for Wilson’s soprano sax, develops into a funky Monkish jaunt. “Just Sayin’,” recorded live at New York City’s Jazz at Kitano (now closed), finds the piano trio in an assertively saucy mood tinged with the blues.

Prayer for What Remains provides a welcome and eloquent addition to the Pintchik discography. Her humanity enlivens her musicality, which offers listeners the company of a wise, supportive, and entertaining companion.

P.S. Here are reviews of Pintchik’s Same Day Delivery; You Eat My Food, You Drink My Wine, You Steal My Girl!; True North; and In the Nature of Things.

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