Jazz

Composers Concordance Records · 19 June 2026

The title track opens on an ostinato from Frank Wagner’s double bass and a minor-key theme that could have escaped from any short piano piece written around the turn of the twentieth century, and a few bars later it has turned into an open homage to Piazzolla’s tango. Eight minutes and five seconds to open the first album by a Brooklyn trio of Dave Marck on piano, Wagner on double bass and Dave Meade on drums, recorded on 18 and 19 June 2025 and released a year later to the day by Composers Concordance. Wagner came up through Berklee, where he studied with Steve Swallow and Ron McClure.

The titles do the guiding. “Hi-Ya” is a joke leaning on Thelonious Monk’s “Bye-Ya” and picking up a Caribbean lilt; “Phrygian Natural Six” announces what it does, an eight-minute vamp over Meade’s Latin grooves built on the Phrygian scale with a natural sixth; and Billy Strayhorn’s “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing” is left to Marck, the one place on the record where the piano really plays alone. They finish with Hendrix’s “Manic Depression”, eight minutes eighteen.

The album is credited to The Holland Court Jazz Trio and on five of its eight tracks there’s a fourth musician, violinist Ben Sutin, who gets precisely the pieces with the most character: the opening tango, the Phrygian vamp, “Domenica Canta”, “Quiet Room” and the Hendrix. The three tracks without violin are “Hi-Ya”, the Strayhorn — which is in fact Marck on his own — and “Invisible Enemy”, and they are the ones that stay with you least, which leaves open the question of what this group is when nobody is sitting in.

Rating: 7.0/10

Text by Aina Torrents