2:20PM BST 10 Sep 2014
The incandescent free jazz of late John Coltrane and Albert Ayler lives on, in Trio 3. In recent years, they’ve released a number of albums on the Intakt label with pianists who share their free spirit. On the latest they’re joined by Vijay Iyer, that intellectually self-aware pianist who unites a reverence for the American tradition with memories of his Indian parentage.
Iyer embraces to the visionary aesthetic of the Trio, which means he’s had to rein in his fascination with pattern and number. However it peeps out here and there, particularly in the repeating bass patterns of Slimm, the first movement of the Suite for Travyon (and Thousands More).
You’d expect anger in a piece in memory of the black teenager Travyon Martin, shot by a neighbourhood watchman in a case that’s still unresolved.
In fact it’s movingly restrained, and has a tone of stoic dignity. In Reggie Workman’s Willow Song Iyer often shadows Oliver Lake’s saxophone melody, before spinning off into some free-wheeling idea of his own. The effect is of something so big it casts a soft-edged shadow. As always with this trio, the blues is never far away, and the pull between that earthiness and the music’s freewheeling impulse is fascinating.
Trio 3 & Vijay Iyer: Wiring (Intakt Records)
