Joy Ellis: Peaceful Place

The best piano trios are often those that have played together for many years, a notable example being the Marcin Wasilewski Trio, whose members have collaborated for more than two decades. These musical relationships become telepathic, creating the impression for the listener not of three musicians but of a single entity. Joy Ellis and her trio have been working together since 2014, and such is the comfortable rapport they have established that, yes, the music seems to be the product of one mind. They have become a force to be reckoned with.

Peaceful Place is Ellis's third album, and as we have heard from other musicians in recent months, Covid has had at least one benefit: isolation and lack of gigs can result in to a pleasing reflective quality in the music that we might not otherwise have heard. Practical constraints also focus the mind. Having booked guest players for her previous albums (Binker Golding, James Copus, Rob Luft), this time she has restricted herself to a limited palette. And no singing this time, just piano, double bass and drums. The outcome: the best recording she's made to date.

Ellis writes all her own material, the compositions occupying similar modernist ground to Wasilewski and Meldau, with pleasing echoes of Debussy and Satie, especially on "My Peaceful Place." In keeping with the title, it's all about melody, rippling streams of it, gently propelled by Henrik Jensen's bass and Adam Osmianski's drums. The latter is a specialist in Brazilian music, who knows all about the subtle cross-rhythms and accents that support the main narrative without dominating it. Jensen supplies a bubbling pulse throughout, finding small spaces in which to develop his own ideas.

Another good example of the trio's empathy is the final track "Begin Again," which Ellis starts with a few scattered notes, punctuated by Osmianski's minimalist scrapes and hisses, before setting up a repeated chordal figure supported by Jensen, and then a simple, rhythmical four-note figure for him and Osmianski to carry through as she explores the theme with her own improvisation, finishing the piece off with a gorgeous chiming coda.