Bob Rodriguez Trio, So in Love, with Dominic Duval and Jay Rosen

Bob Rodriguez is a jazz pianist of stature. His playing gets a near ultimate showcase with a great trio and the freedom to follow his inner music on So in Love (CIMP 393).

This may not be his first album but it is a kind of model of what he does when given carte blanche permission to soar. With him are 2/3rds of Trio X in Dominic Duval on bass and Jay Rosen on drums, who were working-playing with Bob on a regular basis by the time the album was set down, in 2009.

The simpatico vibes are there; we are the beneficiaries. The trio goes through a well-conceived set of classic jazz vehicles: Freddie Hubbard's "Intrepid Fox", Ellington-Strayhorn's "Isfahan", Carla Bley's "Ida Lupino", Monk's "Brilliant Corners", and the like.

Dominic Duval sounds his usual wonderful self. Jay Rosen gets some excellent cooking done here in one of his best recorded performances in such a context (out-bop-freebop).

But the centerpiece that functions to pull it all together is Bob Rodriguez and his immaculately charged pianism. The man gets inside the changes and their implications, the melodic thrust of the tune and breaks out his own very complete vision of his own musical sensibilities, his reaction to the song at hand. Dominic follows closely and has much to say in response. Jay drives the music with the subtle ways and dynamics that make it all hum top-wise.

This is music both in and out, wonderfully forward-moving with continual inventive depth. Listening to the three interact is like appreciating a finely calibrated wooden maze of expertly grafted and beautifully shaped parts--everything meshes and the whole is as near thrilling as are the considerable parts. To listen to how Duval interacts with Rodriguez, how Rodriguez interacts with Rosen, how each part meshes with each is to get a bead on the piano trio in all its glory and its centrality to today's improvisatory arena.

Hear this one by all means. Bob Rodriguez has arrived.

Joe McPhee's Bluette, Let Paul Robeson Sing, 2001

Joe McPhee has been coming into his own for so long, one might say that his outlook borders on continual transformation, continual variation. Good improvisation after all flourishes when players with great talent see fit to mix it up whenever they play.

Joe McPhee's Bluette serves as a good example. It did away with drums and conventional harmonic underpinning instruments in favor of a four-way double duo, so to speak. The Bluette has two dual centers if you ike, one around the "horn section" of McPhee on tenor, fluegel and alto clarinet, and Joe Giardullo on flute and bass clarinet. The second dual center brings in the two-member contrabass section of Michael Bisio and Dominic Duval. The 2001 date Let Paul Robeson Sing (CIMP 257) turns the players loose on spiritual and folk themes associated with the great singer's career, original themes and motifs as well as free-form interactions that do not reference themes per se.

What's remarkable about this session and the group in general is the great wealth of possibilities it realizes: solos, duos of horns, duos of basses, trios of various combinations and of course the full quartet. In Michael Bisio and Dominic Duval one finds an ideal combination of pizz and bowed inspiration. These are two of the very best bassists playing today (and then) in an imaginative zone and they come through. Joe Giardullo has bass clarinet presence here and great flute color; Mr. McPhee of course has no shortage of ideas whatever instrument he may chose to play. His tenor work may identify him in many ways but his work on fluegel and trumpet gives him an alternate persona, and the alto clarinet provides yet another timbre to work out of. The great variety of sound combinations and permutations this ensemble comes up with in the course of the album gives one pause on occasion. It's more than a double duo or a bifurcated quartet. It's an improv kaleidoscope of color, thrust, repose and regrouping.

It is music that one should turn up a little louder than would be the case with commercially ultra-compressed recordings one finds out there. CIMP records sound best when the quietest parts are clearly audible to you in your listening space. Do that and you get the group's tremendous dynamic range, the deep resonance of the basses, the tumultuous power of the horns and the whispers of thoughtful contemplation.

This is an album that plays tribute to the powerful Robeson, his courage in the face of systemized oppression and his ultimate transcendence. The Bluette does not so much tell the story in some musical-literal sense as it uses melodic and expressive elements that capture the man and his times.

It is a marvelously invigorating musical statement. It demands long-term concentration without distraction. Listen several times in such conditions and you will begin to feel the totality of the music as it evolves and develops.

It's a set one must hear. It is a testiment to the generative creative openess and responsiveness of Joe McPhee, Joe Giardullo, Michael Bisio and Dominic Duval. Four exceptional musical minds caught in time, timelessly.

Jimmy Halperin, Dominic Duval, Jay Rosen, "Joy & Gravitas", 2004

Jimmy Halperin has made some wonderful records in the last few years, especially when doing the music of Monk and Coltrane. Today we backtrack to an earlier goodie, an album of classic numbers, Joy and Gravitas (CIMP 301). It's Halperin on soprano and tenor, Dominic Duval on bass, and Jay Rosen on drums. This is a great combination. Halperin is a very lucid improviser on both horns and has plenty to say on these numbers; Jay Rosen gives his usual impeccably subtle but driving loosely free drum accompaniment and Mr. Duval sounds as always earthy and bursting with ideas. They tackle chestnuts like "Night in Tunisia" but also less traveled gems too like the Billie Holiday torcher "Don't Explain" and Jimi Hendrix's "Spanish Castle Magic."

This one may not quite reach the heights of some of the more recent Halperin sojourns, but it also has a wide-ranging inside-outside diversity that will make it an appealing listen to those who are less likely to seek flat-out energy drives for their listening pleasure.

Highly recommended.

CIMPhonia 1998 Part 2, Lest We Forget

I reviewed CIMPhonia Part One just about a year ago on these pages. Today we look at the second volume. It has the same lineup, essentially what is known today as Trio X (Joe McPhee, soprano sax and trumpet, Dominic Duval, acoustic bass, and Jay Rosen, drums) plus some well-chosen bright lights of avant jazz: Mark Whitecage, reeds, Paul Smoker, trumpet, David Prentice, violin, and the late Peter Kowald, acoustic bass.

As before the churning virtuoso two-bass tandem is one of the first things that catches your ear. But of course there's more than that. It's a free-avant set of exploratory excellence. The three horn (or really four when you include Prentice's violin) configuration of McPhee, Whitecage and Smoker (and Prentice) gives collective girth to the improvisations, and each understandably has much in the way of ideas and invention. They occupy the top spectrum of the music, the basses the bottom, and Jay Rosen's always thoughtful drumming rests somewhere squarely in the middle.

Solo moments emerge from the collectivity and then submerge. This is all about the power of seven improv gigantics interacting without reference to anything but their own imaginations. Like the first part, it is state-of-the-art free improv, a rather unsung gem of 1998. Click on the CIMP link in the right-hand column on this page for more information or to grab a copy.

McPhee, Whitecage, Smoker, Prentice, Kowald, Duval, Rosen, 1998

Time flies whether you are having fun or not. So as I listen to CIMPhonia 1998, Part One (CIMP 173) and revel in its improvisatory glow it comes as a shock to me to realize that this recording was made 12 years ago. It transcends time, so that's not the point. It hits me, though, that '98 is now part of the somewhat distant past.

For the music contained on this CD it only underscores how great improvisation has and will outlast the time zone in which it was created. And with Trio X currently touring, it also underscores that the three members (Joe McPhee, soprano, tenor, trumpet; Dominic Duval, acoustic bass; Jay Rosen, drums) have been interacting together for a long time.

CIMPhonia 1998, Part One is a more all-encompassing collective improv date though, so the three are intermingled with some very potent cats: Mark Whitecage on reeds, Paul Smoker, trumpet, David Prentice, violin, and the late Peter Kowald on bass.

The group goes through a goodly contrast of moods and modes, from the "sunrise on the Delta" sort of undulations of "Estrus" to all the sorts of permutations and trajectories artists of this caliber can conjure.

Everybody sounds great and they mesh together quite well. To me though it's the horns as a unit and the two basses interlocking that make for especially remarkable listening.

Perhaps you've missed this one. Don't. In its own sweet way it is a milestone for improv, circa 1998.

Click on the CIMP link on this page to get details.