Evan Lurie's name doesn't come up much outside conversations about the Lounge Lizards, and that's a little unfair, because his piano playing is a big part of why that band worked at all. His brother John got the attention — the saxophone, the movie star looks, the acting career — but Evan was the one sitting at the piano holding the whole thing together with chords that sounded like they'd wandered in from a Weimar cabaret and decided to stick around for a Thelonious Monk tune.

The Lounge Lizards started in 1979 as a joke about jazz, a band of downtown art kids and no-wave types playing music that was too composed to be punk and too weird to be real jazz, or so the story goes. By the time of No Pain for Cakes (1987) and later records, the joke had become something else entirely — genuinely sophisticated writing, a lot of it Evan's, built on the kind of harmonic language you don't stumble into by accident. He studied the stuff. It shows.

What you actually hear when Evan Lurie plays is a guy who loves melodrama and isn't embarrassed about it. There's always a theatrical quality to his piano, a sense of a scene being set, which makes sense given how much of his career after the Lizards went toward film and theater scores. He wrote music for dance companies, for films, for off-Broadway productions, and that instinct for mood and narrative never really left his jazz playing either. Listen to him comp behind a horn solo and you can hear him thinking in scenes, not just changes.

He's not a flashy technician and he's never tried to be. His solo records, things like Selling Water by the Side of the River (1990), lean into a kind of noir lounge atmosphere — slow, a little sinister, full of space. If you come to him expecting bebop fireworks you'll be disappointed. Come to him expecting a composer's ear and a taste for the theatrical side of jazz, the side that remembers Kurt Weill as much as it remembers Bud Powell, and you'll find plenty to like.