Iapetus 2025
Berlin-based and internationally minded drummer engages jazz legends in impromptu greatness.
feat. John Patitucci &
David Kikoski –
Evidence
During the last decade, Diego Piñera has been experimenting with constantly diminishing ensembles, the beat master’s Uruguayan upbringing and Berklee education helping him to rope in fellow musicians from different countries in joining the fun of 2018’s “Despertando” and 2021’s “Odd Wisdom” that were, respectively, laid down by a quintet and a quartet. Quite logically, those albums’ follow-up is the product of a trio arrangement – and what a trio it is! When Piñera headed to New York to meet a pair of his heroes, bassist John Patitucci and pianist David Kikoski, he aimed at recording only a couple of pieces, yet the immediate rapport Diego established with these veterans led to their writing and preserving for posterity two extra tracks. A number composed by the band leader and a Monk cover may not venture beyond tentative understanding of the depth the trinity fathom here, but the cuts they sculpted on the spot point to miracles which can arise from permanent circumstances.
As Patitucci’s robust passages cinch the space between Piñera’s ingenious, ever-shifting groove and Kikoski’s sparsely paced chords, the initial image of Louie Bellson and Cecil Taylor jumping for joy before going for the jugular of “Evidence” will be displaced once the present artists’ personalities shine through this perennial. Although Diego’s talents do so from the beginning, the first two minutes of the titular cut comprising drums and little else, David and John underpin and accentuate their colleague’s creative approach to percussion in the most sympathetic manner, and still focus on the principal melody to take off on a tangent, let it loose and then tie it all together in the tightest of knots. And that’s where Piñera-penned “The Struggle” comes in and unfolds into an elegy which picks up momentum, reflecting one’s inner turmoil via pensive, if increasingly brisk, ivories and frisky rhythm unit whose parts diverge and converge in dynamic splashes, and vanish into silence with an infectious flourish.
There’s much more room for an adventure in the collectively written “La Nube” and “Electric Jam” – the former a well-structured mini-epic and the latter a wigout as free as possible for the three creative spirits to concoct on the fly – so these performances emerge out of the ether with no hurry and reveal their shapes – respectively, romantic and rumba-flavored – little by little. The combo’s interplay is genuinely magical in the absence of showing-off that they abandoned at the door in favor of emotional dance around each other’s suspenseful, expectancy-exuding notes. A delightful offering.
*****
