Jon Easton with Don Messina and Bill Chattin

Jon Easton with Don Messina and Bill Chattin
Cadence CJR 1175

Pianist Jon Easton is a former student of Lennie Tristano and Sal Mosca, and keeps within the stylistic parameters set out by his mentors. Yet this is such an underexplored and vital tradition in jazz that the results still sound fresh. Evan Parker once remarked at a solo concert that his improvisations were in a sense “all part of the same music”: there’s a similar sense in Easton’s music of dipping into a deeper well, or resuming an ongoing conversation, as he revisits perennial Tristano-school touchstones like “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” “Foolin’ Myself” and “Out of Nowhere” – tunes he’s surely played hundreds of times. This is a music where it is hardly metaphorical to refer to the improvisation as containing “lines.” When Easton goes off on a tangent it is literally that: a straight line extrapolated from the curves of the basic chord changes, pursued to the point where it completely overshoots the tune’s structure and the accompaniment. At other points (“What Is This Thing Called Love” and “All of Me”) he spins out lines in the bass that weave so closely through the changes – like a tailor’s needle darting in and out – that it’s as if they’re a celebration of the tune, or perhaps of the sheer exhilirating fact of improvisation. Sometimes – surely unconsciously? – the music reveals unexpected affinities to an entirely different jazz tradition: the emphatic, spartan, virtually themeless lines of Easton’s improvisations at times verge on Andrew Hill territory, while Messina’s superbly volatile bass solos recall Scott LaFaro or even Richard Davis (a good example being his spot on “Dreams”). And what is the Tristanoite determination to let phrases find their own shape and continuation, in despite of the surrounding harmony and metre, if not a species of harmolodics?

It looks like this is something of a banner year for Tristanophiles: Sal Mosca has after long absence from the scene due to illness just released Thing-Ah-Majig (Zinnia), a trio album also with the Messina/Chattin rhythm section. I found that a profoundly moving disc, saturated in Mosca’s sense of mortality and his memories of all the music he’s played and listened to over the years. Easton’s disc inevitably doesn’t have such resonance or originality, but it’s a lovely example of the continuing virtues of this school of piano – if you’re looking for an antidote to the shopworn variations on bebop, Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock that pass for mainstream jazz piano nowadays, it’s an excellent place to start.