Angel feet
The Alchemist and the Catflap
English Isobars
I Remember You
Bebop Tango
Francesco’s Rhumba
Pavanne Tombeau
Snakes and Ladders
Good Morning Heartache
Voyage
The David Gordon trio is
a long-established and highly fluent group,
strong on soloistic verve, compositional excellence
and corporate dynamism. Their influences are
diverse – the notes talk of acoustic grooves,
Celtic folk and baroque music – but that,
I think, is to make the trio sound more fragmented
and incoherent than is actually the case.
Certainly there are elements of those influences
here but the skill is to fuse and coalesce
them seamlessly.
A number of the songs are
originals though there are a few standards
here as well – I Remember You and Good
Morning Heartache – and the title track
gives notice of the tightly swinging direction
the trio takes. The Alchemist and the Catflap,
surely the only portrait of Sir Isaac
Newton in jazz, is a busy and dramatic workout,
teeming with brainy material, whilst English
Isobars is a more impressionistic and
spare piece that verges close to the Great
American Songbook in its lyric strength. Bass
player Ole Rasmussen shows some finely nuanced
playing, Paul Cavaciuti shines behind the
drums and leader Gordon is infectiously accomplished
– strong on accents and rhythm and developing
quite a head of steam.
His piano intro on I Remember
You is teasing in the way Errol Garner’s
used to be teasing but things are even better
on Bebop Tango, a real scorcher of
a performance with some splendidly subtle
gestures amidst the occasionally raucous material
– note for example when Rasmussen takes over
the melodic role. That Latin Americana is
carried over to Francesco’s Rhumba and
there’s plenty of bite and sap in Snakes
and Ladders, another original.
Splendidly recorded this
is a consistently stimulating programme from
a go-ahead and imaginative trio; they take
care of the heritage of the music as well
as summoning up something new minted.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
ZAH ZAH ZZCD 9819 [57.28] 
