Jazz
Dodicilune · 20 May 2026
The Beaver Inn in Appledore is a pub on the north Devon coast, and on 13 May 2025 an organ trio recorded there: Tommaso Starace on tenor, Martin Jenkins on organ and Pip Harbon on drums. Fifty-seven and three-quarter minutes, seven tunes and a spoken thirty-eight-second introduction, which is how the record starts. Starace is Milanese, has lived in England since 1994, and has the sound this format asks for: body, attack and a harmonic turn that owes a great deal to the fifties and sixties tenors he names as his models.
The programme is all other people’s. Monk’s “We See” to open, Cedar Walton’s “Firm Roots”, Benny Golson’s “Stablemates” (eleven and a half minutes, the longest track), Kenny Barron’s “Voyage”, Blue Mitchell’s calypso “Fungii Mama” and Erroll Garner’s “Misty” taken as a ballad, eight and a half minutes for a song that sometimes doesn’t reach four. The trio stretches out without fear: on “Voyage” there’s a tenor-and-drums exchange that doesn’t sound arranged, and Jenkins’s organ does the job the format needs, which is to hold the bottom and stay out of the spotlight.
What isn’t here is a single line of their own. Six of the seven tunes are standards any organ trio has in its pocket, and the record bets everything on how that night and that room sound: with no new material, what’s left is the document of one specific evening with an audience close by. It comes out on Dodicilune, catalogue number Ed619.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents