Gianni Lenoci Trio - Existence (1996)

Gianni Lenoci is a pianist of irrepressible vision. His restlessness for new forms is infectious and unrelenting. This trio, including guitarist Augusto Mancinelli and drummer Roberto Gatto, is one of the headiest he's ever put together. Perhaps that's because Lenoci sounds like he's matured, grown completely into the trio format without having to dominate the proceedings as long as they were challenging him enough to follow them down whatever musical rabbit hole they were winding down. The program here is indicative of how expansive the trio project has become in Lenoci's personal iconography of sound. There are seven original compositions that showcase Lenoci's long-held fascination with Paul Bley's scalar investigation -- he rides his way though to the center of the melody in each case to find the improvising scale, and when he does, he creates arpeggios and skittering skeins of notes to cover it up while opening another door, as on "Form and Freedom," "Out Tempo," and "Secret Thoughts." There are also some well-chosen covers here, including two harmonically different readings of Fats Waller's classic "Black and Blue" and a completely jacked-up version of Roland Kirk's "The Black and Crazy Blues." In each case, the trio functions as a laboratory, scribbling out notes to one another and handing them across the aisles, growing bolder with each track as the changes give way to free playing and the desire to find some ground to walk on that is far from solid, but that will illuminate the shifting harmonics and intervallic deconstructions of rhythm and melody as they re-enter with different priorities. This is a very fine, understated record; it's deceptive in its simplicity and far more ambitious than its muted mauves, grays, and blues suggest.

Review by Thom Jurek