Acting Trio

The Melt Trio's third album has an atmospheric yet exciting effect. Bernhard and Peter Meyer and Moritz Baumgärtner have refined their special style and show even greater will to design in details. Their combination of acoustic and electronic sounds is more subtle than ever, concrete influences from jazz and classical modern to post and prog rock can only be made out in a vague way, because the music simply sounds like a melt trio. It has always been one of the band's trademarks to merge composed and improvised passages in such a way that they can hardly be distinguished. Conventional structures, such as the succession of leitmotif and soloistic abstractions, have long been dissolved at Melt. And if you are looking for fretboard witchcraft for your own sake, you are welcome to find something else.

Introducing “Michael Finnissy – Alternative Readings,” a recording that brings together the visionary compositions of Michael Finnissy, one of the foremost composers of our time, and the exceptional artistry of the Marsyas Trio, mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean, and pianist Joseph Havlat. Finnissy’s distinguished career, marked by British Composer Awards, prestigious teaching positions, and a Koussevitzky Foundation commission, is a testament to his unparalleled ability to weave together diverse musical idioms, embracing inspiration from literature, poetry, visual art, and global folk traditions.

A little nation with a big jazz tradition is the land of fjords and trolls. Fascinating new artists and acts sporting a huge zest for playing and an irrepressible urge for experimentation keep pushing out of Norway to conquer the rest of the jazz world. The Helge Lien Trio, who have already won a large circle of fans in Scandinavia and Japan with their albums and inspiring live concerts, are especially significant. They maintain the balance between jazz traditions and the avantgardist art of improvisation like hardly any other classic piano trio.

In the past, the members of the Oddgeir Berg Trio have remained in the background, acting as instrumentalists for renowned Scandinavian colleagues. With the release of Before Dawn, things are about to change. Their album instantly ranks as an excitingly different entry into the long list of piano trios. And despite their decades of combined experience, it sounds every bit as fresh and hungry as you'd expect from a debut. The sound of Before Dawn was sculpted at a very special place, the band's very own Bonker Studio in Oslo. Entering into this barely 30 square meters small space without windows and secured by a heavy metal door, feels like boarding a submarine.

The seventh year of the successful series "Jazz thing Next Generation" is starting with an extraordinary piano trio. Tim Allhoff, born in Augsburg in 1980, already started playing piano – self-taught – as a child, had the benefit of classical piano lessons later and then studied jazz piano at the Richard-Strauss Conservatory in Munich. He graduated with "magna cum laude" in 2007.

After the excellent "The Abstract Truth", Portuguese saxophonist Rodrigo Amado presents his new trio, with Miguel Miro on cello and Gabriel Ferrandini on drums. The album is a wonderful example of free improvisation, often subdued, soft-toned, with the rhythm section not acting as a rhythm section to the lead instrument, but as a fully integrated part of the overall sound and interaction, to the extent that the individual voices are totally subordinate to it. As I wrote earlier, Amado is a master in intimate expansiveness, but the real quality of this music is the unrelenting tension, which captivates you and makes you want to know what will follow next, hoping that release will come. And sometimes it does, when the nervous pointillism breaks open in a triple powerplay, as on "Testify", or in suddenly blooming melodies, like in "As We Move …".

Johan Lindvall, last seen on Jazzland Recordings as part of Torg, brings a fresh, unfettered take on the classic piano trio format in a series of compositions that are mostly intimate miniatures rather than imposing monoliths. The music drives forward, at times like a fragmentary, sonic kaleidoscope, at others like a (mostly) acoustic version of glitchtronics, frequently hinting at one traditional jazz genre or another before launching in a different direction entirely.

Erodoto Project features mainstays Bob Salmieri and Alessandro de Angelis and is named after the Italian translation of Herodotus. Erodoto is perhaps the first curious reporter, trying to fathom the history of the Mediterranean. Here, the band is enhanced with Murizio Perrone on double bass, Giampaolo Scatozza on drums, Carlo Colombo on percussion and the Miro String Trio including Fabiola Gaudio on violin, Lorenzo Rundo on viola and Marco Simonacci on violoncello.