The Poetry of the Jazz Trio

What distinguishes jazz from all or almost all other music genres is its poetic dimension.  I mean "poetic" in the modern sense: a form of communication that says as much by what it doesn't say as by what it does, and that condenses whole volumes of thought and experience into a few subtle hints.  I recall a very early poem by e. e. cummings: 

Oh, the pretty birdy, O,
with his little toe, toe, toe!

You can imagine that toe, toe, toe, being tapped out on a piano.  Cummings wrote that when he was three years old.  O!  

Almost all jazz does that same trick.  We don't know what kind of bird it is, or how big it is, or what color it is.  But we can get the movement of the three claws and the impression that it makes on the child's imagination.  

Here is an example of what I am talking about.  

Abdullah Ibrahim/Duke 88/Yarona

There's not much of the bird in that.  But you have the whole bird nonetheless, and you appreciate what you have.  Of course, the undisputed master of the jazz trio was Bill Evans.  Evans was better than any other jazz man I have listened to at mastering subtly.  He is always engaged in a duet with silence, and the silence says as much as he says.  Here is a taste:

Bill Evans/Blue in Green/The Complete Riverside Recordings

 The closest thing to that kind of poetry in more recent jazz, perhaps, is the work of Brad Mehldau on his marvelous "Art of the Trio" albums.  Here is Mehldau's little birdy poem. 

Brad Mehldau/Black Bird/The Art of the Trio 1

If you are trying to build a decent jazz collection, get Yarona, and all four of Mehldau's Art of the Trio albums.  Aim for everything by Bill Evans.  And drop me a line. 

More Motian, More Lovano

The Penguin Guide to Jazz, my jazz Bible, lists Paul Motian's Sound of Love as one of its "core collection" recordings. Most of my collecting over the last several years has been based on the Guide. Sound of Love is no disappointment. Joe Lovano plays tenor, and Bill Frissel strums his guitar. My apologies to cherished interlocutor Bass is Life.

It is interesting to note that the solo, duo, and trio, all occupy very distinct spaces in the jazz continuum. A soloist is engaged in a conversation with himself. He may conjure up a larger community of muscians, but it is all up to him. Only the piano makes it easy to fill up the space. Horn solos are almost inescapably lonely. Duos are conversations, but tend to be conversatons between soloists. Trios may or may not cross the line to ensembles, with a soloist supported by a field of feeling. Quartets and more are almost always group productions.

A trio of horn, guitar, and drums, unlike a piano trio, leaves a lot of space behind and around it. Like a duo, it is more three people than a band. Lovano dominates this disc, as one would expect. In a card game between a sax and a guitar, the guitar has no chance. But Frissel knows how to play his cards. When playing behind Lovano, he sounds like a bell choir. When he rises to the top, he still seems careful and very deliberate. The horn has to get out of the way, ofcourse, and with Motian playing it's like Frissel is dancing on coals.

This is fusionesque page four, but just over the line. If you like very thoughtful lines with a big hollow around them, this is your cup of tea. A couple of the cuts are Monk compositions. Here is a sample of one of them, to be usefully compared with a previous sample:

Paul Motian/Misterioso/Sound of Love

If you like it, buy the darn thing. Oh, and post a comment. I get lonely.