Martial Solal Trio

Longitude

(CamJazz)

At 81 years of age, pianist Solal is bursting with ideas and still as eager to play as a twentysomething. In fact, it’s sometimes difficult for his bandmates, the decades-younger Moutin brothers – bassist François and drummer Louis – to keep pace with the feverish but oddly logical solos of the French-Algerian pianist.

Solal’s simple and elegant approach often leads to dazzlingly baroque results. He takes a short phrase and reworks it – stretching the intervals, inverting them and carefully manipulating the space between notes – until he’s constructed a rambling edifice of a solo. “Slightly Bluesy” and “Bizarre, Vous Avez Dit?” are both curiously off-balance pieces in which Solal’s notes ping like raindrops off a tree branch, forming phrases that dance and overlap in beautiful patterns. When he spins long continuous lines, as he does brilliantly on “Monostome,” Solal articulates each note cleanly and clearly. But soon thereafter, he’ll shatter the flow with a fistful of short motifs. Monkish dissonance sometimes spike his phrases. And his bass-register harmonies are rich and mysterious.

Solal employs an equally oblique approach to standards. He blurs the outline of “Here’s That Rainy Day” and “Tea for Two” behind a hail of embellishments and paraphrasing, offering only brief glimpses of the familiar melodies beneath his elaborate embroidery. The Moutin twins follow every one of Solal’s twists and turns, providing perfectly attuned support for this idiosyncratic master of jazz piano.

- Ed Hazell