Berg et Beck Robert Bober

Espen Berg Trio is an award-winning piano trio from Norway. Outselling concert halls in Tokyo, Guangzhou, Kyoto and Hong Kong, the trio is already making a mark way outside their home country and was declared an important new voice in the crowded field of post-E.S.T. trios by Jazz Journal (UK) in 2019. Their music might bring associations to Brad Mehldau, Keith Jarrett, Shai Maestro or Tigran Hamasyan, but is primarily a personal addition to the legacy of the piano trio and the evolution of the Nordic jazzscene, lead by a combination of strong melodies, rhythmic complexity, immense technical abilities and a playful interaction.

For almost 60 years, Elder Charles Beck enjoyed widespread recognition as a singer, pianist and trumpeter, as well as a preacher, church leader and civil rights activist. From 1930 until the late 1950s Beck recorded for Decca, Bluebird, Gotham, King and Chess labels. His lively services at his church in Buffalo, New York gave Beck renown even in folk music circles.

The greatest of Mozart's wind serenades and the toughest of Alban Berg's major works might seem an unlikely pairing, but in an interview included with the sleeve notes for this release, Pierre Boulez points up their similarities. Both works are scored for an ensemble of 13 wind instruments (with solo violin and piano as well in the Berg) and both include large-scale variations as one of their movements - and Boulez makes the comparisons plausible enough in these lucid performances. It's rare to hear him conducting Mozart, too, and if the performance is a little brisker and more strait-laced than ideal, the EIC's phrasing is a model of clarity and good taste. It's the performance of the Berg, though, that makes this such an important issue; both soloists, Mitsuko Uchida and Christian Tetzlaff, are perfectly attuned to Boulez's approach - they have given a number of performances of the Chamber Concerto before - and the combination of accuracy and textural clarity with the highly wrought expressiveness that is the essence of Berg's music is perfectly caught.

The violin concertos of Ludwig van Beethoven and Alban Berg are, on the surface, more different from one another than two compositions could ever probably be. Yet both stand as titans within the violin repertoire and broke incredibly significant new ground. Beethoven's lone Violin Concerto was different than anything that came before it and set the tone for virtually every concerto written after it for nearly a century.

"If the voice don't say it, the guitar will play it," raps Saffron on "Pork-U-Pine," the third track on Jeff Beck's minimally titled Jeff. And he does. Beck teams with producer Andy Wright, the man responsible for his more complete immersion into electronic backdrops on his last outing, You Had It Coming. This time the transition is complete. Beck used electronica first on Who Else!, moved a little more into the fire on You Had It Coming, and here merges his full-on Beck-Ola guitar heaviness with the sounds of contemporary spazz-out big beats and noise. Beck and Wright employ Apollo 440 on "Grease Monkey" and "Hot Rod Honeymoon," and use a number of vocalists, including the wondrously gifted Nancy Sorrell, on a host of tracks, as well as the London Session Orchestra on others…