If you are really, really stupid, then it’s impossible for you to know you are really, really stupid.
Beware the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Read a lot of jazz blogs. Listen to a lot of bad jazz?
Weekend reading around the Dunning-Kruger effect made us laugh and sober up at the same time. What's that? Here's a gloss from John Cleese cited in Scientic American: ''If you are really, really stupid, then it’s impossible for you to know you are really, really stupid.”
Quick disclaimer! Everything on this site is opinion not fact and you can say it's rubbish and stupid if you want. It's a free world. But for context to defend our promiscuous opining so you know how we are seeing Ballades: Turn to thoughts of top piano trio albums this year of which this is screamingly obviously one. None in this short list are stylistically the same.
Vijay Iyer's Compassion is there.
As are the Oddgeir Berg trio on the spookily enchanting A Place Called Home.
Both are very different: Iyer is Andrew Hill informed; Berg, more a player to swim in the world of Ketil Bjørnstad. Both trios are configured in different ways because of the individualised conceptions of beyond-the-bar freedom the drummer in each unit adopts. How the beat is sub-divided is vital. How literal minded the melodies are/are not in terms of being tunes matters. And is the bassist an extension of the pianist's left hand or a proxy drummer you need to ask yourself fast.
But it's been slim pickings if you are a very choosy jazz piano trio fan this year. Not that because there is a scarcity of piano trio albums. There isn't. It's because we set the bar very high as it is such a vital format and there is a huge catalogue of history making recordings going back at least to Bill Evans and 1961's Sunday at the Village Vanguard to make any wannabe tinkler and ''leg end'' park up their egos at least long enough to get a ticket from the jobsworth wardens with their tablets and peaked hats patrolling the bays. For years new young guns and keen copycats with stars in their eyes emerging to unleash themselves on an unsuspecting public have sounded like the last great exponents of the form who in the last 25 years we'd say are, in the wake of the achievements of late period Keith Jarrett Standards trio and Chick Corea's New Trio, Brad Mehldau, e. s. t, Fred Hersch's trios, Ethan Iverson with Grenadier and DeJohnette, Django Bates' Belovèd, Robert Glasper, Jason Moran's Bandwagon and the first Vijay Iyer trio (with Crump and Gilmore).
Playing composer John Zorn's tunes - he isn't on the album - the Zorn pieces written with the language of Bill Evans in mind it seems (modal, Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization informed, etc) are fantastic. Everything works as part of this set of pieces. Nothing jolts into seeming to belong to another album or thought at all. There's a logic. An emotional and even colouristic logic meaning: seeing music written in different keys as if they were different colours or entry points is part of it.
Being overly oblique isn't countenanced. It's all softly rendered and quite hush laden. But it isn't coffee table jazz at all. If it were it would become bad jazz.
'Ballade No. 4' demonstrates how experimental the shape of the tunes and band interplay can be. Pianist Brian Marsella is a revelation. Example: the sheer swagger he conjures on 'Ballade Nr. 9'. The Philly player's albums on the same issuing label, Zorn's Tzadik, include Gatos do Sul. Jorge Roeder who is on double bass - formidable on 2018's The Dream Thief - contributes a whole lot. Because he finds the subtle tipping points that matter. He's like the way Harish Raghavan plays with Ambrose Akinmusire.
Ches Smith who is an avantist doesn't play avant here really. (Terms, eh, we know they are all bollocks but it's just a convenience to use a few.) What have we got if not for words however inadequate. Dear readers pick up the thread with Smith by going back to The Bell, a classic that the drummer made with Craig Taborn and Mat Maneri which is the full monty in that more out-there regard. It's more naked expression if you want another synonym for ''avant'' that doesn't involve the use of ''free''. Nevertheless what the trio achieve on Ballades however disarmingly in all gentility bares all. When you need to know what makes a piano trio tick playing genius compositions the evidence is overwhelming herein.
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