LABtrio, Nature City

When you get complacent and think you have a full handle on something like adventuresome jazz, think again. Anytime I am convinced I have nailed it all down, a new batch of CDs arrive in the mailbox and...oh, there is more that is new!

LABtrio has that surprise element going. Their CD Nature City (outhere music 624) makes me sit up and take notice. The group at hand is a piano trio consisting of Lander Gyselinck on drums, Bram De Looze on piano and Rhodes, and Anneleen Boehme on double bass.

After ten years together, the liner notes inform us, they have been taking fresh stock of themselves. On Nature City they seek to delineate their identity more emphatically with a set of demanding compositions that require a very tight presentation but also a spontaneity and freedom.

Perhaps that is a tall order. They manage to succeed nevertheless with a music that may demand concentrated listening to appreciate properly, but then rewards with some exceptionally deep and advanced sounds.

This is jazz on the brink of a full avantness, yet occupying simultaneously a far corner of the contemporary mainstream. That positioning gives us the sort of advanced piano trio all-over threesomeness and takes it fully into a not-derivative place of its own.

I am rather thrilled with Nature City. It is a surface upon which three very talented players make of themselves a very welcome three-headed hydra that excels both in its compositional rigor and its improvisational spaciousness.

Kudos! Hear this one!