Out next month but can't wait? First sample two tracks 'Nawari' and 'Around the Corner' to dispel your impatience a little. Certainly what's throughout is an exemplary piano trio jazz recording. It's up there with some of the best Eurojazz this year in the piano trio bracket - not at all as grandiose as Tough Stuff or as demurely hypnotic as the Oddgeir Berg trio opus A Place Called Home the other top recordings in the idiom we reckon from Europe this year. Confidences speaks its own language where the key words are spirited engagement that draws from the deep well of a measured sense of romanticism and winches up to the surface a half a century of modern jazz traditions to feast upon.
Passionate yet never over the top for a few further glimpses as to what to expect you can also catch some YouTube examples - particularly how apt a recording (nominative determinism?) of the title track delivered at hotel jazz club Cafe Laurent in Paris from pianist Laurent Coq, double bassist Yoni Zelnik (known for his work with ECM artist Yonathan Avishai) and drummer Eric Pasqua.
Coq, 54, hails from Marseille and in the 1990s studying in New York learnt a lot from Bruce Barth who London jazz fans will certainly know for his playing with visitors such as sax titans Jerry Bergonzi and Charles McPherson.
More recently along with pianists such as iconic French-Guadeloupean veteran Alain Jean-Marie, Coq, who has very much his own sound, recorded a remarkable album also issued by French indie Jazz & People called Solo at Barloyd's. Again, ahead of the 6 September release, on YouTube you can check out a piece that is also on this upcoming album called 'Mazurka for Alain Jean-Marie' which is one of its many highlights.
Framed in progressive, modernistic - but not at all avant-garde - jazz idioms there's great flow, precision and elegance. The writing is extremely persuasive and tunes tell so many stories - we'd say these create pictures too well drawn to be exactly figuratively inclined but certainly prove full of character and colour.
Features 8 Coq originals mostly new tunes.
If you are the sort of jazz fan whose days perhaps understandably rise and set to the considered cadences and grace of a Mulgrew Miller, Kenny Barron or Enrico Pieranunzi approach then you will be up all night long (and still freshly again at cockcrow?) to hear this when Confidences is released. Crisp riffs, sensuous transitions from spirited motif to contemplative reverie, the recording audiophiles will certainly be relieved to know sounds a million dollars sonically. It was recorded over a couple of days last summer at a Pompignan studio called Recall far from Paris in Occitania.
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