Brubeck: Liam Noble Trio

Label: Basho
Year: 2009
Released on LP: No
Released on CD: Yes

Tracks

1. Give a Little Whistle
2. It's a Raggy Waltz
3. In Your Own Sweet Way, Pt. 1
4. Sixth Sense
5. Cassandra
6. Autumn in Washington Square
7. Take Five
8. La Paloma Azul
9. Three to Get Ready
10. Rising Sun
11. Blue Rondo a La Turk
12. In Your Own Sweet Way, Pt. 2

Notes

The Liam Noble Trio (UK) play Dave Brubeck compositions.

"This CD will be an inspiration and a challenge for me to carry on in the avenues that you have opened. I've never gone so far into the unknown as you three but I have opened the door and peeked in. Your CD is an invitation to enter." Dave Brubeck

Reviews

John Fordham, The Guardian 5 Stars *****

This reappraisal of Dave Brubeck's work is so good that the jazz legend himself declared it "an inspiration and a challenge for me to carry on in the avenues that you have opened". Brubeck was an early inspiration for UK pianist Liam Noble, and here Noble takes a dozen of his classics - including Take Five, It's a Raggy Waltz, and Blue Rondo à la Turk - and gives them drastic makeovers. However, he is unfailingly respectful of the original melodies, even if he sometimes leaves it until the track is nearly over before bringing them in. Noble is a supreme motivic improviser, in the manner of Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins and, latterly, Brad Mehldau - not only in the way he unearths fresh melodies on the fly, but entwines them with earlier ideas in the solo and tell-tale echoes of the theme. He delivers a poignant and eventually audacious In Your Own Sweet Way; and introduces Take Five as a folksy doodle, barely related to the original, then turns it into a churning vamp, ending with the theme. On Blue Rondo, the stabbing chords, cymbal crashes and metallic treble sounds don't give way to the famous tune until the final moments. Bassist Dave Whitford and drummer Dave Wickins are key partners in what amounts to a tour de force. No wonder the octogenarian Brubeck thinks it might help him start all over again.

Philip Clark, The Wire - copyright

Dave Brubeck gives British pianist Liam Noble the sort of plug that’s a publicist’s wet dream. Not surprisingly, Noble has reproduced it on the flipside of his cover. “This CD will be an inspiration for me,” Brubeck writes. “I’ve never gone so far into the unknown as you three, but I have opened the door and peaked in. Your CD is an invitation to enter.”

And I’d chuck into that equation the thought that Noble – a pianist who crosses from jazz into free improv with ease – hears in Brubeck’s playing, alongside his roots in blues and swing, a free jazz mindset. Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton heard that liberated side of his playing too, and in his album of Brubeck compositions Noble has extracted this benevolent anarchy and exploded it on to an epic canvas.

Back in 1959, the Brubeck Quartet’s version of “Three To Get Ready” was elegant and unflustered. Noble stamps on that mood by flattening the alternating bars of 3/4 and 4/4 that gave the original its poise. He sucks Brubeck’s line into an out of tempo slipstream that bassist Dave Whitford and drummer Dave Wickins perpetually reform with scratchy timbres and concertinaed time: having extrapolated his spiky, fizzling energies, Noble re-introduces fragments of Brubeck’s original under his dense textures.

“Take Five” and “Blue Rondo A La Turk” are like modern catchphrases, but Noble is unfazed. He moves towards “Take Five” twisting its harmonies around 360 degrees, running to catch up with Brubeck’s iconic vamp as it appears on the horizon. There are some niche Brubeck compositions here too: “Sixth Sense” opens up into a monumental blues, while the catchy “Cassandra” features Wickins’s “Baby Dodds meets Tony Oxley” solo.


All About Jazz -- copyright

That dynamic interplay between Brubeck and Desmond was never more apparent than on the bona fide hit "Take Five," which is even all the more remarkable in the hands of the Liam Noble Trio. On their disc of eponymous interpretations simply entitled Brubeck, Noble on piano propels the iconic jazz track into waters that even the master himself admits he hasn't charted with this material. This 11-song CD is stunning in its complexities squeezed from a trio tackling material written by and for a quartet.

The missing counter to Noble, Dave Whitford's double bass and Dave Wickins' drums, is the alto sax of Desmond. This space is only glaring on "It's a Raggy Waltz," but is remarkably filled by Noble and Whitford on the classic "Blue Rondo a la Turk" and "La Paloma Azul". A fitting homage filled with abstraction and space in its approach to the apex of Brubeck's commercial catalogue—one that is richer and more complex than some may suspect with just the cursory listen.


Paul C. Dowd