ECM Special VII: New Music in Piano

For its seventh installment in the Japan-only ECM Special series, Trio Records finally dedicated a compilation to “New Music in Piano.” The expected constellation is present. Keith Jarrett and Paul Bley occupy familiar zones of gravity, while Steve Kuhn moves nearby with his own restless voltage. Yet the album’s first door opens in a particularly inspired direction: Stanley Cowell’s Illusion Suite, represented by the luminous “Ibn Mukhtarr Mustapha.” Cowell moves between acoustic and electric pianos, then lets the kalimba flicker through, while Stanley Clarke and Jimmy Hopps keep the tune airborne. The result is righteously engaging, a gallery of moving pigments in which groove becomes geometry and melody keeps turning corners the ear did not know were there. The track gives the compilation a thesis without announcing one too loudly: the piano here is an instrument of passage, a set of thresholds through which jazz walks into dream logic while keeping one hand on the body. That sense…