Paris-based pianist Baptiste Trotignon has won French jazz awards, supported a roll call of visiting Americans and has an impressive CV of crossover projects. His focus is on exploring the common threads that entwine European and American music, and at this gig both his compositions and piano playing showed how closely he has integrated the two traditions. Trotignon uses the extended forms of the classical tradition – his second set was given over to his new Suite for Five Seasons – and his touch veers from delicate single-note tapestries to two-fisted romps up the keyboard. And at this gig – featuring the ultra-sharp New York rhythm section and horns from his latest recording – he added the bustling chatter of contemporary urban jazz.
The first set offered compositions from his new album, Share – the title reflects his belief that musical ideas from different cultures should be shared. Trotignon, who was born in the Loire in 1974, opened unaccompanied for the appropriately titled “First Song”, toying with its four-chord theme before introducing first the rhythm section and then the horns. Like his contemporaries, the American Robert Glasper and the British Tom Cawley, he spins micro-variations out of a few looped, densely voiced chords or a repeated rhythmic motif. It is a music of extended structures, evolving textures and rhythmic interplay that, impressively, was sustained when the horns took the lead.
Charlie Wright’s was crammed with people watching every move and appreciating every gesture, and the band dug in and stretched out, delivering more than an hour of richly detailed modern jazz. The latin-tinged “Flow” shifted rhythms and dynamics, warm-voiced horns wove round the ballad “Samsara”, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt got a duet feature and a fast, boppish quote-laden “Dexter” finished the set.
The second set was a continuous performance and even more intense. Drummer Eric Harland orchestrated the band with nuanced taps and rattles, and was tightly locked into the thumpy tones of Matt Penman’s bass riffs and strolls. Saxophonist Mark Turner, bobbing and weaving to the inner contours of his oblique improvisations, traded wispy melody and acute harmonies with an unceremonious swing, a neat contrast to the confident and brassy-toned Pelt. ★★★★☆
