| Jazz |
Chiaroscuro: Kevin Fort and Andy Brown Paint in Light and Shadow
Many album titles are just names, but Chiaroscuro, the new duo record from Chicago pianist Kevin Fort and guitarist Andy Brown, is an instruction for how to listen, and once you understand what the title is asking of you, the whole album snaps into focus. This is a record built entirely on contrast, light against dark, attack against sustain, density against clarity, and the result is one of the most quietly masterful piano-guitar duo recordings in recent memory.
Chiaroscuro is an Italian term dating back to Renaissance art criticism, literally meaning “light-dark,” used to describe the dramatic interplay of illumination and shadow within a painting. It’s most closely associated with painters who used stark contrast not just for visual drama but to direct the eye and build emotional weight. Caravaggio, whose figures often seem to emerge from near-total darkness into a single shaft of light, is probably the form’s most famous practitioner, with Rembrandt not far behind him in his use of deep shadow to give a portrait’s illuminated features almost sculptural presence. Their technique works because the darkness is doing just as much work as the light, neither means anything without the other.
Fort and Brown have borrowed that idea and translated it, remarkably faithfully, into sound. The dialogue here isn’t piano versus guitar so much as piano and guitar taking turns being the light source and the shadow, Fort’s percussive attack against Brown’s warm, sustained tone, moments of harmonic density giving way to passages of pure linear clarity. It’s a genuinely elegant conceptual frame for an album, and unlike a lot of records that reach for a clever title and don’t quite follow through, this one actually earns it, track by track.
Kevin Fort has been open about the album’s most obvious touchstone: Bill Evans and Jim Hall’s landmark 1962 duo recording Undercurrent, a record made in the aftermath of bassist Scott LaFaro’s death that marked Evans’s return to leading his own sessions, and one that’s remembered for the almost telepathic intimacy between the two players. It’s a natural reference point – piano-guitar duo albums are rare enough on record that the Evans-Hall recordings remain the genre’s defining statement more than sixty years later, and Chiaroscuro wears that lineage proudly rather than trying to hide it.
But the more interesting comparison may actually be to Evans and Hall’s lesser-known 1966 follow-up, Intermodulation. Where Undercurrent placed the two musicians in tight, intimate proximity, Intermodulation pulled them apart in the mix, closer to how they’d have been positioned on a concert stage, and it’s that second, more separated approach that Chiaroscuro actually resembles sonically. Producer Vijay Tellis-Nayak mixes Fort and Brown with real spatial separation rather than collapsing them into one centre-channel blend, and the effect is fascinating: rather than diluting the duo’s rapport, the separation sharpens it, letting you hear exactly how tightly these two are listening to each other even from opposite sides of the stereo field. It’s a subtle production choice, but it’s the difference between an album that sounds like an homage and one that finds its own identity within a tradition it clearly reveres.
Chiaroscuro splits its eight tracks evenly between four Kevin Fort originals and four standards, and what’s most striking is how little distance there is between the two categories. The album opens with a vibrant, swinging “How Deep Is the Ocean” and closes with a rapid, propulsive “Night and Day,” and between those two Irving Berlin and Cole Porter classics sit Fort’s own “Morning Light”, “Leroy”, “Dark Flower” and the title track, and they don’t just hold their own, they blend seamlessly into the flow of the record. There’s no audible seam where a standard becomes an original or vice versa. The whole album plays as a single, unified conversation rather than a set list. That’s a genuinely rare achievement, and it says as much about Fort’s gifts as a composer as it does about the duo’s chemistry, his own writing sits comfortably in the same room as Cole Porter and Charlie Parker without ever feeling like it’s reaching.
Fort’s lyrical instincts trace clearly back to Evans, particularly on the flowing “Dark Flower” and the title cut, though his touch here often lands closer to Tommy Flanagan or Red Garland, warmer and slightly more grounded than Evans’s more impressionistic phrasing. “Leroy”, a stride-inflected original, gives Brown one of the record’s most purely joyful moments, his solo pristine and full of the kind of call-and-response interplay that makes this duo format worth revisiting in the first place. Andy Brown, for his part, channels Jim Hall’s precision and inner swing throughout — sustained, slightly bent notes, an unhurried sense of phrasing — and on “Dark Flower” in particular, a hint of Hall’s Latin leanings comes through beautifully. There are moments across the record where Brown functions almost as the vocalist of the pair, with Fort setting up phrases for his partner to carry home: “Morning Light” is a lovely example, Fort’s flourish opening the door for Brown to walk through.
Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” gets a bop-inflected, unison-heavy reading that shows off just how tightly synchronized these two players are, while the ballad “For Heaven’s Sake” is handled with real restraint, nothing oversold, every note given room to land.
What ultimately elevates Chiaroscuro above a well-executed homage is how confidently Fort and Brown make the format their own. Both men are deeply respected fixtures of the Chicago jazz scene: Fort a faculty member at Northwestern’s Bienen School of Music with a résumé including Bob Brookmeyer, John Clayton and Phil Woods; Brown a longtime Green Mill regular who’s backed Barbra Streisand, Scott Hamilton and Howard Alden, among many others.
This isn’t two accomplished soloists taking turns in the spotlight. It’s a genuine duo, built on the same principle that made the Evans-Hall recordings so enduring: that two musicians listening closely enough to each other can create something neither could alone.
Chiaroscuro is a quietly stunning achievement, intimate, beautifully recorded, and built on a concept that the music actually lives up to rather than just gestures toward. It’s a fitting continuation of the Evans-Hall lineage, and a genuine highlight of the piano-guitar duo canon in its own right. Highly recommended.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, August 28th, 2026
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Musicians:
Kevin Fort – piano
Andy Brown – guitar
Tracklisting:
- How Deep Is the Ocean (Irving Berlin)
- Morning Light (Kevin Fort)
- For Heaven’s Sake (Don Meyer, Elise Bretton, Sherman Edwards)
- Leroy (Kevin Fort)
- Yardbird Suite (Charlie Parker)
- Dark Flower (Kevin Fort)
- Chiaroscuro (Kevin Fort)
- Night and Day (Cole Porter)
Recorded at Transient Sound Recording Studio
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Vijay Tellis-Nayak
Photography and design by Kevin Fort