Thomas Bartlett

BIOGRAPHY

Hailed by the New York Times for his “atmosphere and delicacy,” Thomas Bartlett’s remarkable career has seen the musician, composer, and producer performing around the world both as Doveman and alongside Taylor Swift, The National, David Byrne, Nico Muhly, Anohni, and his own Celtic supergroup, The Gloaming, to name but a few. As a producer, the Virginia-born Bartlett has collaborated with an equally impressive array of diverse but like-minded artists, including Bebel Gilberto, Florence and the Machine, St. Vincent, Yoko Ono, Mandy Patinkin, and Sufjan Stevens, with whom he earned Academy Award and GRAMMY® Award nominations for “Mystery of Love,” featured on the soundtrack to the 2017 film, Call Me By Your Name.

Standards, Vol. 1 marks the latest in Bartlett’s ongoing series of solo piano recordings begun with 2020’s Shelter, an acclaimed collection of piano nocturnes that saw the artist return to his classical training and lifelong love for classical forms. “An album of subtle emotional nuances,” wrote Paste, “but each melodic shift feels like a wave. With such a keen sense of melody, he makes reverence and devotion sound dazzling and tangible, but never mawkish.”

Standards, Vol. 1 is an extension of that album’s just-for-me, only-at-home approach. By November 2021, Bartlett had long worked with singers devoted to the American Songbook such as Rufus and Martha Wainwright or Justin Vivian Bond. Not himself reared on jazz, he admired their craft, the way they could embody and transform songs nearly a century old. Bartlett began revisiting favorites by Billie Holiday (a longtime obsession whose output he had repeatedly devoured in massive anthologies), along with timeless staples like “I’ll Take You Dreaming,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.”

Over a week, he figured out his own easiest way into these oft-performed songs, playing as simply as possible in an effort to find their core, not the complications. Standards, Vol. 1 is a series of, if not always first takes, then complete ones, each song played from end to end without interruptions or overdubs, sequenced in the order in which they were recorded. For 70 minutes, the listener sits alongside Bartlett as he lovingly works through these beauties, his keys twinkling through “Tenderly,” its soft-lidded invocation and invitation inherited from Holiday. Bartlett learned “Smile,” which dates back nearly a century to Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 landmark Modern Times, from Rickie Lee Jones; in the pianist’s hands, the title’s life advice is furtive and uncertain, as if he’s unsure where such a command will lead. At the record’s core may be the tandem of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “How Deep is the Ocean,” two favorites of Bartlett’s late grandmother, Rhoda Nason. There is a wonderful glint to his playing on both, almost a mischief, as if he were winking at his grandmother across the room as he picked out the notes, just for her.

A deeply personal interpretation of cherished songs that have been borrowed, bent, and broken by others during their decades of existence, Standards, Vol. 1 sees Thomas Bartlett once more taking new approaches towards solo piano records led by the inspiration of outsiders. A keen collaborator, Bartlett may have made his new album alone, but he made it with Holiday, Jones, his grandmother, and an array of others dipping in and out of his mind as well. That’s quite a cast of collaborators, summoned from more than one great divide, and Standards, Vol. 1 is quite a record, traversing memory and melody, rendered with the authorities of wonder and enchantment.