Sal Mosca (April 27, 1927 – July 28, 2007) was an American jazz pianist who was a student of Lennie Tristano and reigns among the most gifted improvisers of his generation.
After Mosca's two years of wartime service in an army band ended in 1946, the GI bill enabled him to enrol at the New York College of Music, where he studied classical composition by day while listening to such giants as Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum in the clubs of 52nd Street at night. Soon he met Tristano, a controversial but magnetic figure who, over the next eight years of study, shaped his destiny.
His fellow pupils included Marsh and the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, and it was with these two distinctive young musicians that Mosca made his first recordings in 1949 for Prestige. Two years later, he reunited with Konitz for Ezz-Thetic, which featured trumpeter Miles Davis and saxophonist Stan Getz. Mosca also supported the immortal Charlie Parker at Birdland and with Konitz and saxophonist Warne Marsh was a fixture at another celebrated club, the Village Vanguard. While playing opposite the comedian Lenny Bruce at Manhattan's The Den, Mosca was offered a record deal by producer Orrin Keepnews but declined, later explaining, "I never wanted to be caught in the web of commercial success."
Here’s “Pub Bob” from above album
In 1957, on a Konitz album titled Very Cool, his real originality emerged in a series of short solos full of startlingly asymmetrical phrase-shapes, mixing close-voiced chordal passages with agile single-note lines that seemed to double back on themselves. He did not headline a session until 1959, teaming with bassist Peter Ind for At the Den, a live set issued on the Wave label. Mosca issued two more Wave dates, 1961's Looking Out and 1969's Sal Mosca on the Piano.Konitz and Marsh remained his most frequent musical companions and a 1971 recording with Konitz, titled Spirits, contains several duets that demonstrate how adventurously the pianist had developed away from his model.
During the 1975-1980 period, Sal gave solo improvised concert performances in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and the Carnage Recital Hall, both in New York City. He also made a few poorly distributed solo records, including A Concert, documenting a 1979 recital in New York and displaying the full extent of his technical resource and emotional rigour. In1981 he performed solo in Antwerp, Belgium and Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Like his mentor, Mosca spent most of his career shunning the public gaze and after more than a decade out of sight, he released 1990's A Concert, followed by a series of dates for the Zinnia imprint. After 1992 he was relatively inactive. After several years of health problems Sal had recovered sufficiently to begin accepting students at his home in Mount Vernon also recording and performing. Several of his peers considered him the last living great improvisational pianist of their generation.
After a January, 2007 European concert tour, Sal fell ill once again. He died from emphysema in White Plains, New York on July 28, 2007 at the age of 80.
Some artists never receive the credit they deserve during their lifetime. Some may be go-getters with dreams of the big time, but many fly under the radar, doing their work in their own time, only allowing true aficionados or lucky, open-eared listeners into their world. Pianist Sal Mosca was definitely one of the latter, a master musician who perfected his craft and whose work has gone mostly unnoticed, until recently.
