--> Sense liner notes
Toby Koenigsberg, the Trio’s pianist and leader, and its drummer, Jason Palmer, have been friends and musical companions for fifteen years, since school days when they formed their first band. The university town in Oregon where they grew up was a likely seedbed for such efforts, with its variety of venues for music education, many radio stations, and entertainments of all sorts by touring musicians. Over time these two musicians continued performing and developing both together and apart, playing with such jazz luminaries as Marian McPartland, Ben Monder, Rich Perry, Bobby Shew and John Zorn, as well as in popular and classical genres. Now they are working and recording together again in a trio that has had a three-year run. They are joined here by Tyler Abbott, the Trio’s long-time bassist.
The Toby Koenigsberg Trio’s music is rooted in established jazz practices but ranges far afield in inspiration and the feelings that it stirs in the listener. Rather than maintaining tradition’s strict fidelity to a given piece’s schedule of phrases and sections, the Trio uses their own inspiration to move around in its music. Paraphrases, excerpts, and original concepts break up and pull together each piece. As is often the case in new music, it can be hard to tell which sections are completely improvised and which have been previously constructed. Regardless, they seem to lead inevitably to new areas deliberately arranged to flow from or contrast with what has gone before.
The diversity of their performances bring a freshness to this music, a music informed both by a variety of traditions and also by the Trio’s commitment to follow the immediate impulse. Because creativity and surprise are key elements in music's alchemy, turning the listener's attentiveness into a succession of flashes of magic and delight, this Toby Koenigsberg Trio recording succeeds in bringing a new and fascinating soundscape to birth.
13th Species, by the young NYC-based trumpeter André Canniere, begins with a sinister flourish, suggesting a film noir landscape, before dissolving into a spring idyll of shifting rhythms. Here as throughout, the Trio’s players not only fulfill their usual roles in the cooperative independence that is the modern trio’s hallmark – they also exchange them, so that at times piano plays rhythm, percussion plays melody, and bass comes to the soundscape’s foreground.
Confounding expectations, Bud Powell’s Oblivion appears languorously against a samba-derived background, as the piano appears out of rhythm against the rapid steady play of muted drums and the simplest bass pattern. Excitement builds as the group briefly synchs into something closer to Powell’s methods before a dreamlike recapitulation of the opening cadences.
An old chestnut, “Stella by Starlight,” makes an even more distant appearance in Stellaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!(1), like a friend seen across a crowded square. The gentle freedom here displayed is a hallmark of the group’s recent live appearances. Is it coincidence that the last tentative note reappears more strongly to open another standard, My Foolish Heart? The Trio plays this lovely ballad straight, emphasizing and decorating its melodic content while shading the harmonic context.
Another deconstruction from Bud Powell’s catalog of great compositions, So Sorry Please, hews closer than Oblivion to the structure of Powell’s creation while still leaving the group a lot of room for its explorations. Here as throughout, the Trio lets the fragments fly but the seeming disorientation is deliberate and only momentary, as the logic of its conception keeps the action on track with a powerful momentum. Powell’s familiar strains return at the end like travelers come home, enriched by views of distant landscapes.
Koenigsberg’s Variant Strain runs in waltz time, mixing a minimalist structure with layers of simple harmonies. Here the Trio demonstrates how effectively music can shape time with only subtle microrhythmic and textural shifts. Then the playing opens up, elevating the track into a fireworks cascade. A bass solo evolves into a bass/drums duet that maintains the propulsion until the initial motif returns and closes it out.
Stellaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!(2) blasts in like a rocket, the old friend this time appearing flamboyantly but briefly before fading away. Then after a brief and relaxed introduction, Show-Type Tune by Bill Evans, progenitor of the modern piano trio, picks up the pace and runs, in an energetic performance that echoes the stylings of its composer’s own era.
The composer of the opening track, André Canniere, also contributes the last one, Realizing. The transparency of the Trio’s playing, which characterizes this whole session, is even more emphasized here as the piano spins out two simultaneous lines instead of the usual lone one. The rapid tempo and rhythmic vitality with which the group invests Canniere’s composition provide a fitting and characteristic conclusion to this rewarding effort.
Larry Koenigsberg, an on-air personality at KLCC in Eugene, Oregon for over 20 years, has reviewed numerous books and CDs for AllAboutJazz.com and other publications.
©2008 Tobias R. Koenigsberg. All Rights Reserved.
