KEVIN BRADY TRIO - Zeitgeist

I’ve recently got into the fabulous pianist Bill Carrothers from his I Love Paris CD (2006) that proves that good music like good acting just needs someone to look you directly in the eye and speak honestly from the heart without affectation. So I was happy to see him as pianist on new release Zeitgeist under the name of Irish drummer Kevin Brady’s Trio. It’s an absolute delight of beautifully played jazz full of great tunes soulfully rendered and all with a story to tell. That Russian Thing, Waltz Macabre and the deeply ruminant Church Of The Open Air in title alone, all conjure up interesting cinematic images across a range of genres that will have you absorbed. Carrothers is a seriously top draw pianist – with a sometimes Bley-like light touch and elegiac John Taylor style voicings that span both hands – he manages to evoke the style and period of the songs, especially on standards, whilst imbuing them with his individual contemporary edge and oh yes, he swings like the best of them, with the spirit of the great pre-bebop swing pianists like Hines, Cole, Ellington, Garner and Wilson in attack and clarity of line – check out the romping block chords in Home Row. In contrast, on the collectively written Zeitgeist and the impressionistic version of Shorter’s Little Nile he draws on more contemporary even avant-garde piano influences - they've all been refracted through Carrothers' diverse musical prism.

There’s a prevailing mood of freshness, mutual respect and drive that all serve to tell these 10 very different musical stories culminating in the moving Lake Superior homage, Gitchee Gumee, a 7 minute investigation of the soul, full of gospel inflections and probing right hand lines all underpinned by a slow pulsing foundation built by Brady and the stella bass playing of Dave Redmond that will make you murmur ahhhhh out loud as the final chord fades. The all hearing, light and shade drummer, Brady, is a new discovery for me and I can see why this marriage works – both (and I should include bassist Redmond here who is their equal) have a respect for the trio lineage starting way back before any of us were born, both swing like crazy and both have the toolkit and chops to wrap everything up in a sound that yes, feels like it is the Zeitgeist of the jazz piano trio of today. I always hesitate for a few nano seconds when I see trios headed by drummers for obvious reasons, but have no fear, this one is as good as they get and in many respects better than most.

Do you remember going away traveling for a while and then eventually coming home and reaching for an album to play to settle yourself back into reality and the promise of new things ahead? This is what you’d choose.