Latest CD releases reviewed

URI CAINE

Live at The Village Vanguard Winter & Winter

Pianist Uri Caine, bassist Drew Gress and drummer Ben Perowsky are such adventurous players that even the relatively straight-ahead trio tradition espoused so brilliantly here is laced with surprise. Throughout this superb date there's a marvellously creative dialogue going on. Standards are refracted through a collective kaleidoscope and transformed into something rich and strange, while Wayne Shorter's Nefertiti and Caine's arresting originals are scrutinised with irresistible drive and imagination. Caine can tip his hat to Monk and Hancock, but he's very much his own man, and here he leads a trio which, for its combination of the cerebral and the visceral, would be hard to equal, let alone surpass. And they wrap up proceedings with a musically and politically satisfying Caine-ing of President Bush.  - Ray Comiskey

SONNY CLARK/BUDDY DEFRANCO QUARTET

Complete Sessions Definitive

This gem of a reissue covers (on two CDs) all four albums made by the quartet clarinetist DeFranco led in the mid-1950s, in which Clark was the pianist. Children of the bop era, the pair, notably DeFranco, were the stars of the show; bassist Gene Wright and drummer Bobby White simply provided reliable support. DeFranco came directly from Parker, Clark from Bud Powell. Over a programme of standards and originals, they provide some remarkable small group jazz - unforgettable examples of truly great clarinet playing, dazzling in its virtuosity and amazingly unflagging in its inventiveness. Allied to Clark's singular ability to draw on Powell's relentless intensity and, thanks to a lovely, full-bodied touch, they turn it into something buoyantly his own. It makes for memorably idiomatic music. Ray Comiskey

ANDERS JORMIN

In winds, in light ECM

Bassist and composer Jormin, who has cut a multi-faceted, distinguished path through the Scandinavian music scene, brings together an arrestingly accomplished quintet - Marilyn Crispell (piano), Karin Nelson (organ), Raymond Strid (drums), himself and folk singer Lena Willemark - for an album of commissioned sacred music. It combines elements of folk, contemporary classical and free improvisation in a kind of solemn consistency of purpose, which produces moments of stark beauty and jolting anguish. However, despite some outstanding playing by Crispell, Jormin and, notably, the magnificent Nelson, the impression persists that philosophical rather than musical justifications for the performances set the agenda. Ray Comiskey