Alan Broadbent Trio
The longstanding professional relationships of the Alan Broadbent Trio might indicate that the recording at hand is the result of a comfy, well-worn process. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each selection of their new album, Trio in Motion (Savant) is a journey, and the performances are travelogues that sometimes surprise the musicians as much as listeners.
If you’ve paid attention to Alan Broadbent’s discography, you know that he’s one of the most intimate and intense pianists in jazz today. No menu of licks and quotes in his playing; a Broadbent solo is all about flow and serendipity. Hear the liberties he takes with time and phrasing on “Late Lament,” the rhythmic displacement in “Lennie’s Pennies,” and the exchange between block chord passages and the single-note lines of “Lady Bird.”
Conversation figures into how the piano and bass work together. Years of probing duets with the likes of singer Sheila Jordan and pianist Kenny Barron, make bassist Harvie S an ideal collaborator for Broadbent. A piano major at the Berklee School of Music, he transferred his creativity to the bass. “We’re getting a group sound now,” Harvie asserts. “The beginning of it was on our last album, New York Notes (Savant, 2019).”
Drummer Billy Mintz and Harvie S first played together in the 1970s, doing New York gigs with guitarist Pat Metheny and percussionist David Friedman. “It was kind of a fleeting moment,” Harvie recalls, “but I always remembered him. Many years later, I was playing with Alan and he had a Lincoln Center gig. He used Billy that night, and I could hear a world of experience in his playing compared to before. He turned into a superb artist and a good composer.”
