COMPOSERS: John Taylor,Thomas Strønen,Tore Brunborg
LABELS: Edition Records
PERFORMER: Meadow: Tore Brunborg (saxophones), John Taylor (piano), Thomas Strønen (drums)
CATALOGUE NO: EDN 1025
Pianist John Taylor is a creative mainstay of modern British jazz, Thomas Strønen, most recently heard with Iain Ballamy’s ensemble Food, may be one of the most genuinely musical drummers of his generation and saxist Brunborg’s CV namechecks everyone from guitarist Pat Metheny to pianist Jon Balke, so the chances of this album being a failure could never have been greater than zero.
The fact that this set of originals is exactly the sum of its parts isn’t faint praise in this case, as the parts themselves are so intriguing: the saxophonist mainly casts himself as a stater of assertive themes, with Taylor either supporting and developing or gently subverting them, while Strønen adds elegant punctuation. Nicely recorded, this is subtle, exploratory stuff. Roger Thomas