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I feel a bit funny about what might be seen as picking on Charlap, but to my mind (based on some but far from comprehensive experience with his music), there's something kind of odd going on here. About nine years ago I bought one of Charlap's early albums (it may have been his first under his own name), "Souvenir" (Criss Cross), in part because at the time I'd come to trust Gerry Teekens' taste. And it was pretty good -- not highly individual but fluent/sober, kind of like a variation in temperament on the playing of the late Dick Katz. Over time I heard Charlap as a sideman on a few things, and while he seemed rather chameleon-like, fitting in with the relative heat and harmonic edginess of trombonist Conrad Herwig, and playing OK as well in more in-the-tradition settings, I was damn well puzzled by two albums from the early 2000s from his working trio (with Peter Washington and Kenny Washington), "Written on the Stars" and "Stardust" (both on Blue Note). Some stylistic shape-shifting in this (or rather that) day and age is not without precedent, especially when all the material is standards. But on both albums it sounded like Charlap had consciously vowed not to do anything harmonically (or rhythmically, but mainly harmonically) that would have been out of place at, say, the Hickory House in 1955. I say "consciously" because I can't imagine that anyone of Charlap's age and musical background could have produced these performances other than by willing himself to, in effect, forget or ignore all that had happened in the history of jazz piano since '55 and a good deal that had happened before that as well. Now I'm OK on a case by case basis with stylistic shape-shifting when the goal is to inhabit or re-inhabit worthwhile more or less ensemble-oriented music of the fairly distant past, like that of, say, Clarence Williams, which France's Les Petit Jazz Band does with insight and emotional commitment, leaving room for quite individual solo contributions by the likes of clarinetist Alain Marquet. But what was there about the cocktail jazz of the Hickory House c. 1955 that calls for its virtual re-creation, and this on the part of a player who presents himself as an improvising jazz musician? (BTW, any sampling of the music of two pianists who worked in that milieu at that time, Barbara Carroll and Marian McPartland, will yield playing of considerable zest and inventiveness that leaves the Charlap of "Written on the Stars" and "Stardust" sounding virtually embalmed.) Not that I've brooded over this, but I wondered what led Charlap to do what it sounded to me like he was doing. I couldn't imagine that it was a natural stylistic evolution on his part, but if it was essentially calculated and gig-oriented, was there really a demand in, say, the NYC area, where Charlap mostly worked, for this kind of would-be musical-time traveling and for Charlap's IMO quite static end results? Then yesterday, I ran across and (shame on me) bought for $2 a copy of Charlap's "Live at the Village Vanguard" (Blue Note) trio album from 2007. Things were as before but even more so and perhaps odder. A ballad like "Autumn in New York" was even more static, if that were possible -- harmonically and rhythmically vanilla in what again I can only assume was a willed manner. But the performance of George Wallington's "Godchild" (a piece that Charlap played quite nicely in 1995 on "Souvenir" in his aforementioned neo-Dick Katz manner of the time) was now -- the only term I can think of -- absolutely mincing, marked by a host of coy accents and phrases so "shaded" that they pretty much disappeared in the act of playing. What the heck was this? I thought, on the way to Half-Price Books to sell the darn thing for a buck. Does anyone have a clue? To me it's like musical science fiction, a trip to an alternate world that leads me to wonder whether the planet I thought I lived on still actually exists.