In the mid-1980s, the writer-turned-producer David Breskin had an idea for a record. A keen observer of the more adventurous realms of contemporary jazz, he assembled a sort of fantasy-baseball roster, bringing together Bill Frisell — then emerging as one of the most original guitar voices of the era — with Ronald Shannon Jackson, the drummer who had progressed from stints with Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor to leading his own genre-melding ensemble, the Decoding Society. On bass would be the prodigious Decoding Society member Melvin Gibbs.
The experiment yielded “Strange Meeting,” a one-off 1987 record released under the band name Power Tools. Though long out of print, it has become a connoisseur’s favorite, standing apart from any other entry in the three musicians’ sizable discographies.
This fall, a new Breskin-produced trio effort will arrive that carries a similarly uncommon charge. As with Power Tools, “Trio of Bloom,” due Sept. 26 — the self-titled debut of a group featuring the guitarist Nels Cline, the keyboardist and pianist Craig Taborn and the drummer Marcus Gilmore — is a first-time collaboration that feels like the work of a proper band.
These three players are well-known in the orbits of progressive jazz and beyond, and a particular alchemy occurs between them here. (Cline has also been a member of Wilco since 2004, while Gilmore has drummed with Thundercat, Rakim and others.) While each has showed impressive range in the past, “Trio of Bloom” — the name, chosen by Breskin, riffs on Trio of Doom, a short-lived 1979 fusion supergroup featuring the guitarist John McLaughlin, the bassist Jaco Pastorius and the drummer Tony Williams — still startles with its breadth, touching on serene sonic ambience, funky Afrobeat flow and scrambling avant-jazz.
In an interview outside a coffee shop in downtown Manhattan, Gilmore, 38, noted that the scope of the record felt unusually broad. “Even if I participate in these things, it’s never all-encompassing in one ensemble,” he said. “I think with this group, it’s really special, because everybody can go anywhere.”
Taborn, 55, cited a similar kinship among the three. “It’s just eclectic musicians, kind of just leaning into that,” he said, in a separate conversation at a Brooklyn cafe.
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