Benedikt Jahnel Trio, The Invariant

The Benedikt Jahnel Trio celebrates ten years as an entity with a striking album that selects eight of Jahnel's compositions and presents them as they are played these days, after years of live performances and a boiling down to the sophisticated essence of what they are now.

The Invariant (ECM 2523) alludes both to the persistence of the trio and its consistently high level of musicianship. That Jahnel should be an ECM artist is also an invariant--of the label's initial and continuing attention to some of jazz's most innovative pianists, beginning of course with Paul Bley and Keith Jarrett and following through to the present day. The most distinctive of the ECM ivory manipulators have much in common: a highly developed harmonic and melodic sense and the ability to swing as strongly as they can create lyrical largos of great creativity.

Jahnel is one of the very best of the current crop of artists. He shows you that dramatically on the album--just as the trio of himself, Antonio Miguel on double bass and Owen Howard on drums drives home the extraordinary evolution of the modern piano trio as we now experience it. All three artists are integral to the outcome, the years of recording and gigging making themselves felt with a palpable excellence of interdependence and interplay.

This is as fine example of the piano trio art as you are likely to hear this year. It is a celebration, a tribute to dedicated continuity and growth.

By all means, hear this and be moved.

Gilad Atzmon & the Orient House Ensemble, Songs of the Metropolis

There are times when the persistent presence of artists surprises me. That would be the case recently when I auditioned the new album by Gilad Atzmon & the Orient House Ensemble, Songs of the Metropolis (World Village 450024). The band has been together now for 12 years, gigging around Europe, the world, bringing their sounds to audiences across the planet, recording, doing what they do. Yet I had forgotten how long-lived they've been.

The new one is strong. Gilad has a kind of Eastern European tinge to his clarinet and soprano sax tone, especially. There are traces of Garbarek to be heard there too but it's all wrapped up in his own approach. This new one is all about cities/places of the world. Each cut is devoted to one, and the compositions flow nicely in a post-ECM kind of vaulted classicity. Sometimes it gets a little into a jazz-rockish funk zone, but whatever the stylistic territory Gilad soloes over it all with strength after strength.

It's excellent listening and a beautiful way to launch the band's 13th year. Atzmon can write and he can play. There is very ample evidence of that on these pieces!