Kris Davis: Run the Gauntlet

While Kris Davis hews close to the hallowed piano trio format on Run The Gauntlet, her first return to the set-up since Waiting For You To Grow (Clean Feed, 2014), she inevitably gives it a few intriguing twists. By recruiting bassist Robert Hurst, alumni of Tony Williams, Steve Coleman and Wynton and Branford Marsalis, and drummer Johnathan Blake, a Blue Note leader also to be heard with Kenny Barron, Ravi Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, she ensures a driving beat which buoys up even her more wayward detours. Listen with just half an ear and you might not realize how deliciously far left of this set's norm lies.

Although offered in dedication to six trail-blazing women pianists, Davis does not pay explicit homage in any other respect than channeling their determination and commitment to an individual sound. At over twice the length of any of the remaining ten cuts, the opening title track does it all. In a series of lurching grooves, Davis awards her minimalist figures maximalist heft, with such a profound sense of rhythm that she needs little accompaniment.

But as well as turbocharging the impetus Hurst and Blake also get to set out their own stalls. The bassist picks up on a tumbling phrase from the leader as the unifying element in a resonantly melodic pizzicato feature, while the drummer's whirlwind excursion comes garnished with increasingly dissonant interjections. Even so, perhaps their most notable achievement is to make all the accelerations and decompression seem unforced and natural.

You could almost stop there, though that would be to miss out on some serious fun. "Softly, As You Wake" presents the first of three textural exchanges, as the pianist delves inside her instrument to suggest the chiming sonorities of gongs and gamelan. At the same time, Hurst's moaning arco could be a call to prayer. Blake contributes the only non-leader original with the rich harmonies of the stop-start ballad "Beauty Beneath the Rubble" which is followed by "Beauty Beneath The Rubble Meditation" another exploration distinguished by plink plonk preparations, cymbal coloration and bowed murmurs.

Elsewhere Davis takes "First Steps" alone, recalling Cecil Taylor with a stumbling pattern in the bass register, latterly overlain by a skipping treble refrain, while she comes on jazzy on the cooking "Knotweed" (which incidentally begins with a stomp which is a dead ringer for the ostinato from Anthony Braxton's "Composition 40 P" 1976 duet with Muhal Richard Abrams). "Dream State" matches its title with a shimmering Erik Satie-esque air, while the album ends with "Subtones," which could almost be a summation, combining as it does the interior high jinks, as Davis interventions evoke a thumb piano, with a throbbing funky vamp.

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