State of the art piano trio. If anything way ahead of the curve.
Track of the day and new in the 1 Luv slot it's the formidable English expat Stateside based avant pianist John Escreet here with Branford Marsalis quartet and Tarbaby bassist Eric Revis and the Glasperian drummer Damion Reid.
Escreet is impossible to categorise. Last time we heard him live was with Logan Richardson but it's very different here because he switches to interject oblique vamps against a roiling open beat and avant drum groove that eventually delivers up a spiky concise statement in the break-out from the theme that not only shows his immense command of the piano well away from say the Kansas City sound that Richardson sometimes draws on by veering more towards the European avant garde, a space that say Bruno Heinen is just as comfortable with when Heinen opts to conjure Stockhausen. But Escreet's original approach to the discipline of improvisation by leveraging tightly disciplined construction in the composition still retains an unerring ability to uncoil from its exacting rigour to land in a seemingly spontaneous direction that you can't expect. Based on what we glean from these tantalising minutes of power and passion at ease both in the sprint and laying back to a very fast jog in the assorted tempi it's more than the sum of the three parts we are certainly looking forward to hearing Seismic Shift from which the track is drawn in its entirety on release in October.
Eric Revis, top left, John Escreet, Damion Reid. Photo: artist's Twitter page
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