Since adding a third musician is what transforms a duo into a group, the trio format is a time-honored vehicle in jazz. Three new trio releases emphasize a mix of tradition, transition and fearless creativity over commercial appeal, with a number of personnel overlaps or connections. Keyboardists Craig Taborn and Vijay Iyer, heard here on separate albums, have recorded and toured previously in a two-piano format. And drummer Marcus Gilmore, who appears on two of the three albums, has also recorded with Iyer, who co-leads Fieldwork, the third of these musical triangles.
Craig Taborn, Nels Cline & Marcus Gilmore, Trio of Bloom (Pyroclastic Records)
Though none of these three albums feature standard jazz trio instrumentation, Trio of Bloom comes closest. Yet keyboardist Craig Taborn, guitarist Nels Cline and drummer/percussionist Marcus Gilmore are anything but a standard organ trio. Taborn, on piano and synthesizers, prefers to be less predictable with his left hand than simply supplying a bottom end through implied bass lines.
The keyboardist’s career includes tranquil solo piano efforts on ECM as well as free jazz and electronic explorations. He blends all facets of his amoebic approach with his like minded band mates on Trio of Bloom. On a facelift of Wayne Shorter’s “Diana,” for instance, Taborn plays celeste, an upright bell-piano, amid Cline’s loops and Gilmore’s toms, which are tuned like timpani to accommodate each chord change.
Not yet 40, Gilmore continually splits the difference between drummer and percussionist throughout, even when he isn’t functioning as both. He also contributes a gorgeous, spacious ballad in “Breath,” which hinges on Taborn’s piano. The drummer brings youthful exuberance to the album’s centerpiece, “Bloomers,” a 10-minute free improvisation in which he rhythmically routes his elders (Cline is 69, Taborn 55) into dub territory and beyond. It’s also Gilmore’s lengthy, propulsive intro that sets the tone for the opening cover of drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson’s “Nightwhistlers.”
The disc often purposely veers into the jazz wilderness, and while the trio’s primary melodic wild card is Taborn, its harmonic ace is the similarly amoebic Cline. A member of Chicago-launched pop/rock act Wilco for the past 20 years, the guitarist supplies that band with soaring solos and interlocking lines with vocalist and fellow guitarist Jeff Tweedy, but Cline becomes a comparable outlier within his solo work and on sessions like these.
The guitarist adds occasional 12-string and lap-steel textures throughout, and even bass to his 6/8 Afrobeat-tinged original “Queen King” and an insistent treatment of Terje Rydal’s “Bend It.” Taborn’s compositions are the tone poem “Unreal Light” and the hyperkinetic “Why Canada,” three minutes of spiked mania featuring his Thelonious Monk-isms, Cline’s warped warbles and Gilmore’s cacophony.
This trio’s personnel was brought together by producer David Breskin. Cline had never played with Taborn and Gilmore, and the latter two had worked together only sparingly. Breskin’s credits include production chores on Strange Meeting, the lone 1987 album by Power Tools, his handpicked trio of guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Melvin Gibbs and the aforementioned Jackson on drums. Like that influential release, Trio of Bloom boasts a sound exclusively its own. Its only commonalities lie in this similarly strange meeting’s unpredictability and categorical defiance.
Jakob Bro, Wadada Leo Smith & Marcus Gilmore, Murasaki (Loveland Music)
Drummer Marcus Gilmore is also featured on Murasaki, by another trio with limited playing time together. Joined by legendary veteran trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and 47-year-old Danish guitarist Jakob Bro, the drummer is again the youngster in the group. Bro assembled this trio to record Murasaki (out October 3) for his own Loveland Music label.
In this unorthodox brass, strings and percussion configuration, Gilmore takes on more of a leadership role, composing or co-composing six of its seven tracks. His “Winnowing One” and “Winnowing Two” are unaccompanied pieces that open and close the album, respectively. And in both, he blends drums, cymbals and glass percussion into thought-provoking updates on the standard drum solo format.
Much of the material is spacious, devoid of any obvious time signature and composed by all three musicians, often including improvisation. “Sonic Mountains” features Smith’s powerful blasts before the trumpeter drops out midway, allowing room for Bro’s chimed, minimalist chording and Gilmore’s creative cymbal accents. “Yoyogi Park Dream” features Gilmore’s brush work among Bro’s dreamy, effects-laden accompaniment, and brass expressionism that proves Smith’s lungs are at full capacity at age 83.
The best of the co-composed pieces is “Heart Language,” Bro’s elegant intro and call-and-response lines meshing with Smith as Gilmore creates a supple undercurrent. The Smith-Bro dialogue, also memorably heard on drummer Andrew Cyrille’s album Lebroba (ECM, 2018), practically takes the track into film noir territory.
Smith contributes one composition, his solo piece “Chronicles of Bending — Air Columns and Fire Discourses” making the listener want to hear more than its one minute and 37 seconds. But Smith and Gilmore’s co-composed “Imagine the Fire and Flames That Light Up the Light World” makes up for any perceived slight. Clocking in at more than eight minutes, the track seems to encapsulate free jazz’s past, present and future.
Fieldwork, Thereupon (Pi Recordings)
Pianist Vijay Iyer has been the constant on the four recordings of the trio Fieldwork trio since 2002. But Thereupon is its first since Door (2008), and also the first to feature repeat trio members in alto saxophonist Steve Lehman and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. The delayed follow-up might be due to Iyer’s longstanding prominence as a bandleader and educator (work that has also closely involved Sorey as a member of his current trio).
On Iyer’s opening “Propaganda,” his classically influenced piano chords provide relative calm amid the storm of Lehman’s alto flights and Sorey’s freneticism. It’s a two-minute appetizer that sets the tone for the disc’s middle main course.
Lehman’s offerings include the spiked “Embracing Difference,” during which he occasionally drops out to make way for manic dialogue between Iyer and Sorey. On his “Domain,” the saxophonist alternately darts within, around and behind Iyer’s cascades and Sorey’s cymbal accents; his “Fantome” and “Astral,” respectively, showcase Iyer’s capabilities on Fender Rhodes and Sorey’s use of space as he guides his bandmates from simmer to boil.
The keyboardist’s “Evening Rite” is an improvisational cat-and-mouse game with each musician responding to a phrase or leading the other two players into uncharted territory.
Lehman is a New York City native now in LA, Iyer is from Rochester, New York and Sorey from Newark, New Jersey. Though the drummer isn’t credited with any compositions on Thereupon, the 45-year-old’s stature as a composer is well-established. The album credits indicate that all tracks were “collectively developed and arranged by Fieldwork,” and you can hear the work Sorey put into those processes.
Iyer’s brief, stately title track practically serves as second appetizer, as his simpatico partners respond to his every classically tinged foray. Which makes the closing, eight-minute-plus “The Night Before” a hefty dessert. Lehman alternately soars, sings and breathes through his horn, accentuating Iyer’s range of ivories, electronics and treatments as Sorey offers up intermittent yet pinpoint percussive accents to a masterful closing statement. JT