Marcin Wasilewski Trio - Faithful

Review

Long-running lineups are a rarity in jazz, but pianist Marcin Wasilewski's Polish trio have played together since they were students in the early 1990s, and their ability to catch and amplify each other's thoughts reflects this.

Like their earlier ECM albums Trio and January, Faithful is predominantly pensive, but the trio are vivacious even while dreamwalking. The album displays the group's trademark urge to raid a variety of songbooks, splicing pieces by Hanns Eisler, Ornette Coleman, Paul Bley and Hermeto Pascoal with five originals.

Of the latter, a softly pulsing, Brad Mehldau-like groove introduces the spare, poignant Night Train to You, and Mehldau's hypnotic, improv-building style is also invoked on the mid-tempo Mosaic. The Coleman title track is slowed to a reverie against a distant drum rumble, and Fran Landesman and Thomas Wolf's Ballad of the Sad Young Men is edited to a diaphanous pencil-sketch of a piece.

Slow-starters, such as Song for Swirek, swell to ticking swingers, but only Bley's Big Foot – a gleeful, on-the-fly conversation for Wasilewski, bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michal Miskiewicz – really represents this trio's foot hard down on the gas.

John Fordham - Guardian UK 4 Stars

Dazzling third ECM album by Poland’s Wasilewski Trio, which perfectly captures the group’s blend of energy and lyricism. There is space here for both the outgoing and the reflective, for profound composition and in-the-moment creativity.

The wide-ranging repertoire on “Faithful” (named after the Ornette Coleman title track) includes five new tunes from the pen of Marcin Wasilewski and timeless pieces by Paul Bley and Hermeto Pascoal. From the standard repertory, the trio plays “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men”. Reaching beyond jazz, the players also find a new approach to Hanns Eisler’s “An den kleinen Radioapparat”.