Brian Groder Trio, with Michael Bisio and Jay Rosen, R Train on the D Line

The Brian Groder Trio has a new one, a welcome volume two. The trio with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Jay Rosen scored big with me in 2014 (see July 24, 2014 article) with their first outing, and this one is as good or even better than that one. R Train on the D Line (Latham Records 6001) has a CD release date of April 13th but can be gotten at i-tunes in the meantime, as I understand.

Brain Groder is the thinking person's trumpet-flugel master and composer, to my mind. His compositions are complicated modern vehicles with a readily grasped core. They serve as excellent launching pads for the profound three-way goings-on between Groder, Bisio and Rosen.

Jay Rosen has made his mark as a member of Trio X (the trio with Joe McPhee and Dominic Duval) and sounds especially great on this album. He is a drummer of acute sensitivity, poise, swing and sound color.

Michael Bisio one of modern avant jazz's foremost bassists, often found these days as a member of Matt Shipp's wonderful trio. He shows why he is so highly regarded here, with some formidable contributions to the whole. You might listen to his playing in itself on these tracks and gain much, but of course his playing blossoms forth as an inegral part of this trio music.

Brian Groder gives us eight substantial compositions that form the basis for the angular geometric togetherness and bright improvisations to be heard. His special unvarnished but directly communicative prowess on his horns make the music come vibrantly alive. The music swings mightily and as needed crosses the border to freely articulated timelessness that nonetheless swings with the same energy and drive as the time-based grooving.

Everybody connects with a most eloquent unleashing of meaningful and moving music speech, something that is as rare in this realm as it is in the spoken word world we otherwise inhabit. They SAY a great deal, in other words, and what that is should very much be heard!

It is some music that brings you a model of how new jazz has evolved over the years to incorporate the expressive opening up of the music in the '60s into a new kind of superlative classicism. It thrives as chamber jazz but decidedly not of an anemic sort, far from it.

If you want to know something of where new jazz is today, I recommend this volume heartily. It has much great music to explore and unwrap. This is art, and a fine art indeed. Get a copy!!

Brian Groder Trio, with Michael Bisio and Jay Rosen

I have been appreciating Brian Groder for a while now. He plays trumpet very architectonically. What? Architectonic...having a clearly defined structure. There is form in his improvising which is related to his composing. We get Brian's architectonics laid bare, so to speak, on his new trio album, with the self-explanatory title Brian Groder Trio (Latham 5901).

There's one piece by Joanne Brackeen; the rest are by Groder. He choose well in including bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Jay Rosen. Both respond with brilliance to free architectonics. Michael is one of the very foremost inventive bassists on the scene today and Jay a great drummer who does not always get the recognition he should, though as part of Trio X he gets exposure, surely. He sounds better and better these days.

So Jay responds beautifully and contributes his special time and color to this trio. Brian and Michael interact with exceptional grace and inventiveness. Both play out of the compositional implications of each number in interactive bliss and on their own.

The performances are not to be missed. The compositions hit you in the ears and the trio through-improvises on them with a musical logic that is outstanding.

Do not wait! Get this one because it rings out as one of the best this year!

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.

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.

The David Arner Trio: Out/In the Open, 2007

Pianist David Arner is a musical voice that does not fit easily into the various schools of improvisation that are widely influential among the free school of players. He's managed to forge a path that does not cross directly the Cecil Taylors, the Paul Bleys, the Keith Jarretts, or the Bill Evans influenced players. Not that he has ignored these stylistic landmarks. Clearly not. But he chooses to go his own way.

You can hear that quite readily in the 2007 recording Out/In the Open (Not Two 812-2). It's a trio date with the formidable alliance of Arner with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Jay Rosen, all key institutional-foundational figures in the creative improvisational music of the present era. The album's hour-long program features four collective improvisations, an Arner composition ("Intensities") and a standard ("My Romance").

There is remarkable piano trio interplay throughout. Rosen listens creatively to what Maestros Bisio and Arner are doing and gives out with the coloristic energy washes that he does so well; Bisio is alive with noteful counter improvisations to Arner's forward-pressing expressions; and David unleashes the full spectrum of the music he hears, which engages the jazz tradition, the expressive intensities of the avant, the expanded harmonic, melodic and textural potentialities of the piano and the musical ideas he has in abundance.

It's a documentary testament to what these three imaginative players can achieve in the space of a single session. And it's a sterling example of Arner pianism at its best.

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.