The renowned bassist and a founding member of Litchfield Jazz, Mario Pavone, has a new release.  Entitled Philosophy, this one is recorded by his Dialect Trio with Matt Mitchell on piano and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. JazzTimes reviewer Jim Macnie wrote this about Pavone’s latest tour de force:

Mario Pavone places the airiest ballad next to the feistiest rocker on his new Dialect Trio album…The band uses a jeweler’s eye to conflate abstraction and swing, beveling the key elements that balance the veteran bassist’s cagey pieces. Pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer Tyshawn Sorey are deeply aligned, as they were on Philosophy’s

predecessors, Chrome and Blue Dialect; the propulsion they generate in cahoots with the leader’s aggressive string work gives everything a kick.

Melodies come and go in this music. Pavone’s pithy themes…present themselves and then take a powder, leaving room for the flexibility central to the trio’s mission statement. Feathery maneuvers by Sorey morph to finessed aggression. Mitchell’s parade of skittish inversions often yields focused pronouncements. The strategies they share on “Everything There Is” propel a tightrope walk, each new improv choice (tom-tom rumble, splashy upper-register trill) paving the way for the next. It would be an apt soundtrack to the daredevil moments of Man on Wire, James Marsh’s portrait of World Trade Center acrobat Philippe Petit.  The takeaway here is pliability, as it so often is in Pavone’s work. This is an outfit obsessed with dynamics, in the business of triggering switcheroos and proud of its ability to dodge repetition…

Editor’s note: My only regret: these wonderful 7 tracks were not 14!–VWM