Jazz
J-Man Records · 10 September 2026
The decision that explains “Arrival” is an absence: there’s no double bass. Michael Eaton on tenor and soprano, Nicki Adams on piano and Francisco Mela on drums cut nine tracks at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn, with Adams’s left hand taking on the harmonic job the low strings would have done — lines thick with notes and close chords that never let the foundation slip, with the odd stride excursion along the way.
The repertoire helps more than the line-up does. “Black Sabbath” isn’t the song the title suggests: it’s an Andrew Hill composition, and the trio dispatches it in four minutes and twenty-five seconds, the shortest of the pieces they did not write, as if not wanting to make too much of the joke. Beside it sit Wayne Shorter’s “ESP” and Thom Yorke’s “Daily Battles”, arranged by Eaton, which is the one moment the trio lets a piece move on atmosphere rather than accumulation. Eaton’s “Kupka Disks” is the long one: ten minutes and sixteen seconds, in eighth place.
A trio without a bass ought to leave room, and this one leaves almost none. When the piano is doing harmony, foundation and solo all at once, the middle register never stops, and across nine tracks there are only two places where things open up: the Thom Yorke piece and Cole Porter’s “It’s Alright With Me”, which is exactly where the three of them finally start to swing. Across the other seven tracks, Adams’s left hand never stops long enough for Eaton to drop a phrase and let it hang. It is the third record Adams and Eaton have made together, after “Paraphrase” (2022) and “The Transcendental” (2024).
Rating: 6.8/10
Text by Aina Torrents