Alt Tal – Open The Gates! + The
Conduit Trio – Beyond Liquid Glass + The
Jeff Presslaff Trio – Red Goddess (Independent Jazz CDs)
Sound:
B/B-/B Music: B/B-/B-
Three
albums of Jazz than showcase mostly instrumental performances came our way
recently and they speak of three different approaches to making such material
today. Alt Tal – Open The Gates! is an outright jazz album with great
playing, tricky time signatures and no pretense to anything. The trio of David Alt, Kenny Annis and Andrew
Ryan really deliver an intense 11-track work here that features all new
material and it is one of the best new Jazz albums we have heard in a while.
The Conduit Trio – Beyond Liquid
Glass takes the
urban laid-back approach with mixed results from its ambitious, but uneven 16
tracks that did not usually stick with me.
The Jeff Presslaff Trio – Red
Goddess album was also uneven, but at only 10 tracks. The spiritual theme never worked for me and
though not a concept album, felt like it wanted to be one but would not
try. Serious jazz fans will want to hear
all three, but I would only recommend Open
The Gates! beyond that genre audience.
The PCM
16/44.1 2.0 Stereo on all three titles are not bad, but subtle differences make
for noticeable ones in playback. Gates is
the most sonically able, with clarity, articulation and consistency that the
other two lack. It has very little
compression and is a step above the others, which are compressed sounding.
- Nicholas Sheffo
