Bobo Stenson Trio - Serenity (2000)

Best known in North America for his work with Jan Garbarek and Charles Lloyd, pianist Bobo Stenson has a conception deeply rooted in the stream of lyrical pianists that includes Bill Evans, Paul Bley, and Keith Jarrett. Their varied trio philosophies, too, have certainly shaped the three-way inventions that Stenson develops with his long-standing partners, bassist Anders Jormin and drummer Jon Christensen. That established, though, no one is likely to mistake Stenson for anyone else. There's a genuinely Nordic quality to his music, from the open intervals of his native Sweden's folk songs (the kind taken up by visiting jazz musicians like Stan Getz and Art Farmer) to a particular sense of light that suffuses the trio's music.

There's an acuteness of listening here–to the overtones of piano, cymbals, and bass–that savors the barely articulated as well as the overt. The music has range–from Cuban Silvio Rodriguez's "El Mayor" to Alban Berg's "Die Nachtigall," from angular collective improvisations to Wayne Shorter's "Swee' Pea" and pieces by Charles Ives and Hanns Eisler–but it also has depth, the two CDs of Serenity emphasizing that very quality in Stenson's music. The reflective moods here touch on the somber and the unresolved, as well as the wistful and the joyous, the group folding them into a welling sonic beauty. It's piano trio music of the highest order. –Stuart Broomer

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