Jazz
Hammer Recordings · 29 May 2026
A trio with no bass. Florian Arbenz brings drums and a set of custom-made percussion instruments, Greg Osby the alto and soprano saxophones and Bill Frisell the guitar, and the low end is built by the drummer out of those instruments of his: that is the design he explains himself, and what lets him say the three of them sound like more than three. The session was on 8 September 2025, about four hours, almost everything in first takes and with no overdubs.
The seven pieces are Arbenz’s except one, “Lueget vo Berg und Tal”, a traditional Swiss song, and the drummer cites Max Roach and his idea of the drummer as composer when he explains where they come from. “Homenaje” opens with a rhumba figure and “Rhumba” closes with the name spelled out, so the record begins and ends in the same place. Chris Allen engineered the take, Hannes Kumke mixed and mastered, and it came out on 29 May on Hammer Recordings, Arbenz’s own label. The sharpest account of what this way of working buys is Brian Earley’s at the Free Jazz Blog: on “Chant” the drums are barely audible and let the saxophone and the guitar fill the whole room, and the traditional piece arrives with cymbals and bells played at very low intimacy. Arbenz puts the method in writing: settings “simple, but sound-wise very defined”, built so that the two voices up front do not have to compete with anything.
There is, however, one decision that does not hold. In the shops the album is credited to “Florian Arbenz & Greg Osby”, and Bill Frisell — who plays on all seven pieces and whom Arbenz’s own website puts first when it announces the release, “my trio album with Bill Frisell and Greg Osby” — does not appear in the artist field. Anyone looking for it under Frisell’s name will not find it, and in a trio of three equals that leaves out the name most people would recognise. The iTunes listing does it, and so does every service that copies it. Arbenz founded Conversation_LAB in 2024 to do exactly this: put musicians from different generations and backgrounds in a room and record whatever comes out. Osby was already on the lab’s list of collaborators; Frisell arrives with this record.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents