3x3: Piano Trios: April 2022

Okay, we're technically cheating here since this first one is a duo, but there's a full enough sound that you probably wouldn't know it. As is so often the case with piano groups, there's no end to the variety.

Glass Museum
Reflet
Self produced
2022

Glass Museum isn't nearly as fragile as that name sounds. True, they have something airy about them—there's a resonant crystalline tone to the piano and their pieces have a certain streak of chamber-jazz elegance—yet at the same time it's grounded with insistent EDM-like rhythms and gut-level bass grooving that's a long way from delicate. It suggests a structure that looks light and translucent, but will stand through a storm without a scratch.

Antoine Flipo occasionally adds some stabs of bass synth underneath the frisky riffs, but as often as not, it's unnecessary with Martin Grégoire's clattering to propel things along. The rhythm skitters and hops with a fun and funky electro-pop persistence. Clear ringing acoustic piano blends with primal fuzz tones or gets overlaid with ambient swirls while the beats almost never stop pulsing and throbbing. This is an experience that's partly picturesque film score and partly catchy techno-jazz rave a-la GoGo Penguin, a constant whirlwind of colors for the mind.

Lynne Arriale Trio
The Lights Are Always On
Challenge Records
2022

Nobody would have blamed Lynne Arriale if this recording was an especially bleak one. Not only troubled by the first couple years of the Covid crisis and the US's social turbulence in that time, she suffered the extra blow of being widowed in mid-2021. Instead—perhaps still not a shock to those who know the fundamental warmth of her sound—she looks for goodness and sets her sights on those she calls "the angels of our time." The Lights Are Always On is understatedly inspiring in paying tribute to the world's health workers and activists for justice.

Arriale doesn't deny the sadness of the circumstances but spins her meditations with weight and care. The stirring flavor of a protest march offers both drama and optimism. Soothing gospel suggests the sound of old-time Americana with the encouraging feel of progress for today. The hopefulness beneath it all is the subtle kind, not stomping out in front but glowing with simple everyday persistence. Like an actor who can pack half a dozen emotions into one line, Arriale doesn't need to explain or dramatize. Her playing simply lets us feel the weight of history, old and new, with a grace that seems effortless.

Tord Gustavsen Trio
Opening
ECM Records
2022

You could say Tord Gustavsen is always in a state of opening. His piano work is about leaving space as much as playing; however deliberate the notes are, there's always breathing room in between. His classy Nordic compositional style can include adding flavors from the church or the tropics or anything between. Likewise, from recording with basic piano trio to adding voice, sax and light electronics, each recording naturally drifts somewhere that's different from before, always open to the next natural shift.

In that spirit, Opening sounds like his least composed release yet. There are deliberate germs of ideas, but the trio never lets them get pinned down very much. Folky or funky vamps get briefly picked up and just as quickly left to float on the breeze. Quick teases of soul or gospel come and go and come again. A seed of Latin tango is stretched and drawn out into a synth-drone meditation more haunting than heated.

New addition Steinar Raknes complements the others with noticeably bright walking bass in the livelier spots, then simmers down to minimal arco or lightly processed abstract textures in others. His amorphous tones and Jarle Vespestad's ever-judicious drums float alongside the leader's piano, with no plan except to trust their instincts and see what happens. The music of this newest trio opens up like a flower, just as slow and just as pretty.

Tracks and Personnel

Reflet

Tracks: Caillebotis; Shiitake; Elipse; Reflet; Swimming Trees; Auburn; Opal Sequences; Kendama.

Personnel: Antoine Flipo: piano, keyboards; Martin Grégoire: drums.

The Lights Are Always On

Tracks: March On; The Lights Are Always On; Sisters; Honor; Loved Ones; Sounds Like America; The Notorious RBG; Into the Breach; Walk in My Shoes; Heroes.

Personnel: Lynne Arriale: piano; Jasper Somsen: bass; E.J. Strickland: drums.

Opening

Tracks: The Circle; Findings/Visa Fran Rattvik; Opening; The Longing; Shepherd Song; Helensburgh Tango; Re-Opening; Findings II; Stream; Ritual; Floytelat/The Flute; Vaer Sterk, Min Sjel.

Personnel: Tord Gustavsen: piano; Steinar Raknes: bass; Jarle Vespestad: drums.