Two of the most engrossing jazz tracks in recent months, the Tyshawn Sorey Trio’s “Your Good Lies” and Kim Cass’s “Slag,” share a classic trio instrumentation and the presence of Sorey behind the kit.
Sorey’s “Your Good Lies,” a cover of a track by the pop-soul group Vividry that features the pianist Aaron Diehl and the bassist Harish Raghavan, is a vortex of downtempo groove, sprawling across 26 zoned-in minutes. “Slag,” in which Sorey performs alongside the bassist-bandleader Cass and the pianist Matt Mitchell, is a meticulous yet marvelously frantic scramble that exhausts itself just shy of the three-minute mark.
Taken together, these ultimately very different pieces — drawn from Sorey and Cass’s new albums, “The Susceptible Now” and “Levs” — point to a major theme in jazz in 2024: Piano trios are everywhere, and their potential still feels limitless.
The piano-bass-drums combo has been a staple since the late ’50s and early ’60s, when trios led by Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans modeled the crisp elegance and conversational charge that the format could offer. In subsequent years, as new approaches have come and gone, the music has always made room for great piano trios: Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio, Brad Mehldau’s three-piece, Jason Moran’s Bandwagon, the Bad Plus.
This year’s crop is striking for its robust growth: Many major pianists are involved — Vijay Iyer, Bill Charlap, Kris Davis, Matthew Shipp, Ethan Iverson, Nduduzo Makhathini and Mitchell, at the helm of his own group — plus notable up-and-comers such as Marta Sanchez and Luther S. Allison, and other instrumentalists and composers like Sorey, Cass and John Zorn, and the collective group Tarbaby. And it’s notable for the sheer variety of work these artists have produced. Orthodox approaches to the idiom are easy to find, but so are a wealth of other tacks, ranging from the earthy to the outré.
Charlap’s recent live album, “And Then Again,” represents one extreme of the spectrum. Those familiar with the jazz scene could probably guess the personnel, setting and repertoire in one try: the bassist Peter Washington and the drummer Kenny Washington, Charlap’s (unrelated) bandmates for more than a quarter century; the group’s regular haunt, the Village Vanguard; and time-tested standards. But the in-the-moment joys of, say, their rendition of “Sometimes I’m Happy” — with its luxurious weave of bass and drums, Charlap’s offhand virtuosity and Kenny Washington’s surprisingly high-stakes switch from brushes to sticks midway through — show that there will always be a place in jazz for excellence within the tradition.
But thankfully there’s more than one jazz tradition, a point that Tarbaby — which includes the pianist Orrin Evans, the bassist Eric Revis and the drummer Nasheet Waits — has emphasized forcefully across its nearly 20-year history. On earlier records, the three musicians have always featured various guest artists, but on this year’s “You Think This America,” they appear exclusively as a trio, making a definitive statement. Where the roles in a band like Charlap’s feel comfortably divided between leader and sidemen, Tarbaby is an indivisible, non-hierarchical force. Consider “Red Door,” a catchy Evans original that shares space on the record with pieces by outside-the-box heroes such as Ornette Coleman, David Murray and Sunny Murray (no relation). The group improvising on that piece feels like a diner-booth conversation among old friends — loud, hectic and loving.
The collective communication on display in these trios can also take subtler forms. “Tone IQ,” from Shipp’s album “New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz,” gives weight to the record’s lofty title with its uncommonly spacious approach. Shipp long ago proved himself a master of the tougher, edgier side of free-form jazz, but his work has always made ample room for poetic understatement. Here, he and his longstanding collaborators Michael Bisio and Newman Taylor Baker on bass and drums take that element to an arresting extreme, introducing sonic events with sculptural care — a swooping arco figure from Bisio, a few cymbal or drum-rim taps from Baker, a slow-motion melodic phrase from Shipp — and punctuating them with gulfs of silence.
Davis achieves something similar on a handful of pieces from “Run the Gauntlet,” an outstanding first effort from her new trio with the bassist Robert Hurst and the drummer Johnathan Blake. Hurst, who powered bands led by both Wynton and Branford Marsalis in the ’80s, and Blake, one of the contemporary scene’s most reliably propulsive percussionists, are both expert drivers of the beat. But on “Softly, as You Wake,” for example, they assert themselves as master texturalists, as Hurst mingles sparse bowed bass with Blake’s cymbal scrapes, washes and flutters, and Davis adds crystalline patterns that combine her instrument’s natural sound with tasteful prepared piano. On the epic title suite, the trio digs heartily into Davis’s obliquely funky vamps, uniting and diverging in turn to dazzling effect.
This kind of rhythmic brio has been a hallmark of the 21st century piano trio, in part thanks to the influence of Iyer, whose work has employed an unconventional momentum for more than two decades. On his latest, “Compassion,” his current bandmates, the bassist Linda May Han Oh and Sorey (in another standout appearance) shine on more reflective pieces like “Prelude: Orison,” but there’s a special excitement in hearing them gradually turn up the flame on a fierce yet refined prog-jazz riff on a piece like “Arch,” which honors Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Connoisseurs of the modern piano-bass-drums unit as a kind of stealth power trio shouldn’t miss Sanchez’s “Perpetual Void,” on which she, the bassist Chris Tordini and the drummer Savannah Harris lean into choppy, pointillist figures to winningly tense effect; or Mitchell’s “Zealous Angles,” where he, Tordini and the drummer Dan Weiss revel in the warped effects of rhythmic cohesion and collision.
The piano-trio efforts that have arrived this year often feel insular in a good way — mini aesthetic universes distinct from any prevailing trends in jazz, which lately has steered toward a channeling of the saxophone-centric ’60s avant-garde or attempts at balmier inter-genre hybrids. Faced with more than 60 years’ worth of prior approaches, as well as new horizons looming, many musicians are smartly putting their own agendas first, staking out the territory that makes sense to them, and — much like the great piano-bass-drums combos of the past — constructing a whole world within a simple triangle.
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