The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, London N16 8JH | Bookings 020 7254 4097 | Enquiries 020 7993 3643 | Email Info at Vortex

CD reviews

New cd releases

 

Browse CD reviews

A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z 

Join the Vortex
email list

To receive monthly gig details, news and ticket offers.



RSS feeds

For news, gig and CD reviews and information about the club.

Click on the link below to get the subscribe address
Vortex news

For more informaton about RSS see the
RSS help pages

Howard Riley

Three Is One

ASC Records asc cd 98

The title will immediately alert close observers of Howard Riley's recorded output to the fact that this is by way of being a follow-up to his 2005 album, Two is One (Emanem); here, instead of overdubbing two pianos, he reverts to a format documented nearly thirty years ago (on Trisect, Impetus), involving his twice overdubbing spontaneous reactions to previous improvisations and thus ending up with a piano trio.

Actually, in the two longest pieces here, Riley adds a piano per section, so that solo becomes duo, duo then becomes trio, but whatever the slight differences in approach, the result is quintessential Riley: what Richard Cook, in his indispensable Jazz Encyclopedia (Penguin, 2005) calls 'flinty, bonily resilient music with a northerner's distrust of swank and an extensive range of approaches codified by a trenchant imagination that always wants to get to the heart of the matter'.

Vigorous, absorbingly dense and positively teeming with ideas, this is, superficially at least, not the easiest music to assimilate ­ it demands close and sustained attention ­ but it richly rewards such effort by revealing fresh felicities on each hearing; Vortex patrons will be able to judge for themselves at an ASC Records gig involving Riley this autumn.