‘Skyline’ is the traditional jazz trio format you’ll love – Yahoo News

Sep. 15Skyline

Ron Carter, Jack DeJohnette, and Gonzalo Rubalcaba. 5 Passion Records.

If you love the traditional jazz trio format, you'll love Skyline.

Due out this Friday, this amazing album features Grammy-winning pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba and National Endowment for the Arts jazz masters Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette on bass and drums, respectively. Carter received the NEA jazz master honor in 1998 and DeJohnette followed in 2012.

Both are two of the more highly regarded and sought-after jazz artists.

Carter and DeJohnette also are no strangers to Rubalcaba, who was raised and educated in Havana before emigrating to the Dominican Republic in 1991 and then to Miami in 1996. He said early gigs with those two turned out to be his "real school, [his] portal to a different relationship with American musicians and American music."

Rubalcaba sought out the two of them again for Skyline, a project filled with Afro-Cuban rhythms but also one which allowed for a lot of individual creativity gained from experience.

In the opening number, "Lagrimas Negras," a Cuban standard from the 1920s written by Miguel Matamoros, Rubalcaba plays like a house on fire. I'm not kidding. His furious tempo and incredible dexterity on the keyboard makes your jaw drop. It's not just fast. It's brilliant.

All three of the musicians brought in a pair of tunes previously recorded by other musicians, to give them fresh new visions and reinterpretations. Several were originally recorded between the late 1970s and late 1990s.

The shortest number of the nine-song disc also hails from the 1920s, a Cuban standard called "Novia Mia," by Jose Antonio Mendez. It is three minutes and 26 seconds of sheer beauty in which the trio steps back into a real soothing groove, putting listeners in a delightful trance.

The final song is a fun, bluesy mashup written by all three, called "RonJackRuba."

The talent's outstanding on this disc, but so is the collaboration. If you like that stripped-down, unplugged interplay between jazz piano, bass and drums, this is one of the best to come out in a long time.

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'Skyline' is the traditional jazz trio format you'll love - Yahoo News