Before the 1960s – and a while after that in most places – a jazz piano trio consisted of a pianist doing nearly all the work and a bassist and drummer simply underpinning the tempo and rhythm. Now and then, the last two were allotted solo spots, often out of deference to skill sets buried in routine and repetitive accompaniment.
Everything changed with the Bill Evans Trio. Pianist Evans wanted to get away from this idea of a main player and two subordinates and substitute instead an arrangement whereby, as far as was possible, all three were more integrated, with the piano first among equals. To that end he hired as his bassist the incomparable and startlingly talented Scott LaFaro and the drummer Paul Motian. At first, LaFaro’s input was often disproportionate, so that inaugural gigs sometimes sounded like the Scott LaFaro Trio. There was work to be done. But it was soon completed, with different bassists and drummers after LaFaro’s untimely death fulfilling newly-fashioned, not to say revolutionary, roles.
Cardiff-based pianist Ross Hicks, a graduate of the glittering Jazz course at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff will be aware of these antecedents. Among piano alumni from either the RWCM&D or Cardiff University’s Music department, Hicks has declared his intent by self-recording an album, Three Elms, with a trio – Nick Kacal on bass and Alex Goodyear on drums – fashioned on post-Evans transformations. Both Kacal and Goodyear have academic backgrounds, the former at the University of Salford and the latter, like Hicks, at the RCM&D.
For the Black Mountain Jazz Club in Abergavenny, they played charts from the album interspersed with music that reflected or inspired them. Three Elms consists of Hicks compositions. In many respects a new piano trio bringing out a début album would have to be special. And Three Elms is.
For a start, Hicks is a popular guest at BMJ and it was at an appearance with the club’s house band, the BMJ Collective, that a few of the charts on Three Elms were first made public: the title track, Short and Sombre, and Cuarentena. That Goodyear was one of the Collective’s instigators makes for a closer connection.
At this trio gig, where the musicians could spread out and extend themselves musically, three elements stood out: Hicks’s exploratory pianism, incorporating meditative, exuberant and leadership qualities; Kacal’s taut and often complex bass lines that threaded the musical arguments together and gave the performances weft and depth; and Goodyear’s spellbinding mastery of most ways in which the kit’s armoury could both buttress the melody and embellish it with everything from cymbal scrapings to cowbells, all with enormous restraint and musicality considering the thunder and lightning at his disposal.
And there was more. Evans opened up structural possibilities for the piano trio that his successors have embraced in the way the Hicks trio did here. For example, and perhaps not unexpectedly, Hicks is no Evans simulacrum (though no post-Evans pianist can avoid the American’s searching, often contemplative, ways) and he takes from others: in this reviewer’s opinion, both Keith Jarrett, and Lyle Mays of the Pat Metheny bands as well as Chick Corea in the carnivalia. The Metheny/Mays composing duo is there or thereabouts too.
The lengthy piano introduction to Short and Sombre and the way Kacal followed it with what would normally be called a solo but here, in charts conceived as all of a piece, was the more elevated quality of continuation in different form, became the start of a musical journey that had a beginning, and end and a middle packed with improvisational content, not least when enveloped in crescendi and climaxes. When Kacal later returned with what one might have called a routine solo it slotted in as part of the concept. Goodyear came into his own on the Latin-infused Cuarentena and in an encore tribute to the Buena Vista Social Club, El Cuarto de Tula. Numbers not on the album also included Eddie Heywood’s Canadian Sunset and bassist Dave Holland’s How’s Never.
As an example of how far the piano trio has come since the days when the drummer and pianist were in the metaphorical shadows (and, in the case of pianists such as Erroll Garner, often surplus to requirements), one could have noted how rare were the occasions on which Goodyear shuffled with traditional brushwork, shimmered the ride cymbal and bomb-dropped on the snare drums. Things haven’t so much changed as been revised and added to. In that sense the Hicks trio is keeping abreast of the times, reminding itself no doubt that it’s over sixty years since Evans introduced LaFaro at the Village Vanguard in New York and altered the piano trio’s range of accomplishments for ever.
Hicks is one of a group of jazz pianist graduates from the RWCM&D and Cardiff University’s Music department who are commanding attention. They include Guy Shotton, Eddie Gripper, and Michael Blanchfield. Shotton is ccurrently based in New York, and Gripper also has formed a piano trio with drummer Patrick Barrett-Donlon and bassist Ursula Harrison, the 2024 BBC Young Jazz Musician. The Gripper trio’s début album, Home, has been released on the Ubuntu record label.
Great review! And a great gig.