A Breathtaking, Hall of Fame Jazz Summit with Kenny Barron, Dave Holland and Johnathan Blake

The album cover image says “The Kenny Barron-Dave Holland Trio Featuring Johnathan Blake.” The new record, Without Deception – streaming at youtube – is going to draw innumerable obvious comparisons to the classic Barron trio of the 90s with Ron Carter on bass and Lewis Nash on drums, but this is a completely different animal. That group’s brilliance notwithstanding, it’s rare that you encounter a meeting of the minds this smart, or downright exciting, a real cross-generational summit.

This is the kind of record that you hear and ask yourself, why did I take so damn long to listen to this? Barron tends to be more about simmer than blaze here, but that’s where his bandmates step in.

That’s obvious right off the bat with Porto Alegri, a bossa. Blake is more of an extrovert than Nash and does his best work in a trio setting, whether his own or others. Case in point: his wry cymbal flashes to open the song, not to mention that rolling-thunder soundscape over Barron’s eerily muted vamp afterward. The pianist also doesn’t waste any time ceding the spotlight to Holland’s dancing solo.

The band veer in and out of a casual stroll in the aptly titled, wary Second Thoughts. Blake is exceptional on this – a single muted tom hit for shock, a press roll to surprise, and a pervasive cymbal mist are just part of his game. So is Holland, voicing an airy midrange horn line and then chugging back into the lows.

Barron establishes a similarly regal, modal disquiet and then goes shuffling toward wry Mose Allison territory in the album’s title track. The three revert to rather majestic bossa territory with Until Then, Blake never breaking the clave despite all the elegant boom and crash. They scamper through Speed Trap, Barron’s Monkish disquiet matched by Holland’s bobbing bass, Blake bringing the storm.

The jazz waltz Secret Places is far more pervasively dark and bluesily anthemic: in a surprisingly understated way, it’s the album’s high point. Blake begins Pass It On with a resolute centercourt solo, waiting for his bandmates to get in the paint and take it to deep, bluesy New Orleans. Then Barron brings a raptly lingering, spacious soulfulness to the Ellington nocturne Warm Valley,

The group balance gravitas with a tropical lilt in the album’s most expansive number, I Remember When, lit up with edgy cascades from Barron, a brooding bounce from Holland and all sorts of fleet-fingered touches from Blake. The trio end the album with the tropicalized yet enigmatic Worry Later. A clinic in tunesmithing and teamwork from three of this era’s best.