Piano Trio Speaks In Present Tense

Perhaps it was the fact that the trio had just finished a marathon recording session for its second album. Or perhaps it was the players’ extensive experience as players and composers. Whatever it was, on Friday night at Firehouse 12, Mario Pavone’s Blue Dialect trio — Pavone on bass, Matt Mitchell on piano, and Tyshawn Sorey on percussion — demonstrated that in the right hands, the piano trio format can easily look forward into the future and maintain ties to jazz’s complex and varied history, while remaining in the moment, and in the room.

The piano trio has long been an anchor in the sound of jazz, from the lush, romantic explorations of Bill Evans and Vince Guaraldi in decades past to recent innovative covers of Nirvana and Radiohead by The Bad Plus and the Brad Mehldau Trio. Bassist, bandleader, and Waterbury native Pavone was present for a lot of those developments: In a career of nearly five decades, Pavone has participated in a wide range of recordings as both leader and sideman, and his playing has always demonstrated a quality of searching, questioning, pushing himself and his bandmates to more clearly articulate the sounds he’s hearing.

In an unaccompanied bass solo midway through ​“Cobalt,” in the trio’s first set, Pavone sang many of his lines as he played them — not uncommon in the tradition — while also reacting to what was coming from his instrument, as though he was choosing exactly what sounds he was sending through his instrument, and conveying the rest of what he was hearing with his voice. It seemed the most natural distillation of the densely harmonized line of the tune’s head, and left the audience wondering what a pure conduit to Pavone’s musical imagination would sound like. (In full disclosure, this reporter has performed and recorded this composition with Pavone in a different lineup).

The trio’s performance also broke down the usual leader-sideperson hierarchy of the format. Pavone counted the group in on a few occasions, but was more than happy to trust Mitchell and Sorey to make interpretive choices that served the music well. Pavone’s percussive attack on the bass freed Sorey to push the limits of pulse, to sometimes submerge it completely within swirls of delicate cymbal work, or to abandon it to silence. Another composition in the first set saw a melodic line pulled from a focused burst of sound in the beginning and into a denser context, the musical equivalent of a Hitchcockian perspective trick. The ballad-like sense of tempo allowed the tune a delicacy that ended with Sorey exploring a half dozen pure tones hidden within his cymbals, a cloud of sound produced entirely by the friction of sticks and metal, with only a few standard hits to punctuate the end of the section.

In ​“9/22/15,” a composition written by Pavone on the titular date in Florida, the trio explored the orchestral possibilities of the trio format. Mitchell employed a full range of sound from the piano while Sorey’s sensitivity to phrasing and the timbre of his drum kit offered an equal melodic response. Pavone encouraged audiences to avoid thinking of the swamp in his introduction, but his playing, combined with Mitchell’s and Sorey’s, created a sort of sonic ecosystem.

Many of the compositions visible from the audience were written on a single page; the group opened them up almost immediately to collective improvisation. Solos, like Pavone’s above, were often unaccompanied, allowing each player to make harmonic and rhythmic choices beyond the trappings of chord changes and pulse, but never ignoring those motivators completely when it was time for the group to rejoin. When the players took more traditional solos, the other members of the trio were still free to react. This was most clear in Mitchell’s solos, which followed the clear tonal logic of the composed material but ranged into extensive passages of modulations, not unlike those in Bach fugues or the hazy Debussy Preludes. In these moments, the cohesiveness of Pavone and Sorey as a rhythm section was most apparent, pushing at Mitchell with an obvious sense of groove even as each player accented the pulse in different, shifting ways.

But the sense of ​“presence” and ​“present” was most apparent in the readings of the composition ​“New Trio” that opened the first set and closed the second. The first performance sprang out of the gate with clear walking lines subverted by heavily syncopated accents. The music quickly transformed into an improvisation, with some impressive hi-hat work from Sorey bridging the piano and bass. The breaths of full silence within this piece seemed as confidently chosen as the moments of ferocious sound. Then, the spacious improvisation that led into the closing version framed the choices of the piece proper in a different light, making the composed material almost unrecognizable but still just as assured. Neither version was definitive. Both saw Pavone reacting verbally and musically to the work of his collaborators, expressing a joy in the moment that was alive in the room.