Future Stride

Emmet Cohen attacks the piano with a joyful muscularity that channels the full-bodied swing of Oscar Peterson and the harmonic adventurousness of McCoy Tyner, driving this uptempo piece forward with a rhythmic authority that makes the instrument feel percussive and melodic simultaneously. The stride piano tradition — that rolling, self-accompanying left-hand technique born in Harlem rent parties a century ago — gets reinvigorated here with modern harmonic vocabulary, the bass notes walking with purpose while the right hand spins lines that are technically dazzling without ever losing their melodic thread. His trio locks in with the telepathic interplay that only comes from musicians who have spent thousands of hours on bandstands together, the drummer trading fours with Cohen in passages where the energy ratchets upward in waves that crest without crashing. The recording captures the acoustic bloom of a real piano in a real room, the hammers and strings and resonating wood all present in the mix. Cohen represents a generation of jazz musicians who approach tradition not as museum curators but as living practitioners, finding genuine excitement in forms that predated bebop. This is music for momentum — the soundtrack to a morning when everything clicks, when your stride lengthens and the city feels like it was built for you to move through.