When Standards Meet Hamasyan's Hands
Hamasyan doesn't just play these songs—he rewires them completely while keeping their souls intact.
StandArt is Tigran Hamasyan's conversation with the American songbook, and it's a genuinely weird conversation in the best way. By this point in his career, Hamasyan had already proven himself as a virtuoso capable of almost anything on the piano—fiendish technique, weird time signatures, fusion impulses, compositional depth. But here he strips back to standards, the songs everybody knows, and asks what happens if you play them like your brain works at three times normal speed. The answer is: something closer to the truth than the ballroom versions.
What makes this different from other standards records is that Hamasyan isn't being reverent or winking—he's genuinely curious about the harmonic and rhythmic skeleton under songs like "Body and Soul" and "Autumn Leaves." He fills them with passing chords, reharmonizations that shouldn't work but do, and an approach to tempo that feels almost restless. The trio with Matt Brewer on bass and Evan Travis on drums gives the album swing and elasticity; they're locked in but also chasing Hamasyan's ideas. This isn't background accompaniment. The result sounds like someone who learned jazz from studying the language itself rather than memorizing dialects.
It's not an essential starting point—go to Flow State (2014) or What If There Is for a better entry. But StandArt matters because it shows Hamasyan could take the oldest material in jazz vocabulary and make it feel urgent and strange without disrespecting it. That's harder than it sounds.
Who's playing
Matt Brewerinstrument
Justin Browninstrument
