The art of the trio: Ernesto Diaz-Infante, Satoko Fujii, Zoh Amba, Wendy Eisenberg

Recently I was chatting with a musician friend about the efficacy of the trio as an improvising ensemble. He started out mentioning Sandy Ewen-Damon Smith-Weasel Walter and Harriet Tubman by way of example, then added Motian-Frisell-Lovano and Gateway. Because I have a few more rings around my trunk than my friend does, I'd also include the original Tony Williams Lifetime, Band of Gypsys, and even Cream. Not to mention Ornette and Sonny Rollins's trios. 

But what is it about the trio that makes it such a good vehicle for improvisation? Maybe it's the combination of interacting voices in a format where it's easy to hear and distinguish between them. And in today's economy, it's more cost-effective to tour a smaller unit; first-time collaborations are a staple of the improv world.

I first became aware of the Bay Area-based guitarist-composer Ernesto Diaz-Infante through his work with Texas percussionist Lisa Cameron, but he's done lots of other work as well -- over 40 recordings so far -- including his newest, Puzzle. On this digital-only release, for the Floridian Muteant Sounds label, recorded in Paris last June, Diaz-Infante and his collaborators -- drummer Marcio Gibson and electric guitarist Michel Kristof -- create extreme close-up soundscapes based on the colors and textures of acoustic and electric strings being bowed, scraped, muted and plucked, hammered and slid on, and sprung-rhythm drum clatter. Their sonic stew can have a ritual, ceremonial stateliness, storm like a turbulent ocean, or reverberate with echolalic disorientation. One of the more intriguing mind-movies I've heard lately. 

Pianist Satoko Fujii is no stranger to the trio format, but her new album Hibiki, on Strasbourg-based Jazzdor, is the debut release by a new project, Trio San (kind of redundant, as san means "three" in Japanese), a collaboration with Japanese musicians based in France and Germany. Fujii had been playing in a duo called Futari ("two people") with vibraphonist Taiko Saito since 2019. Saito, in turn, had been playing in a duo with drummer Yuko Oshima, and suggested that the three join forces. 

Trio San is a collective, with all three members writing material. A planned European tour had to be postponed until 2022 due to Covid, and the musicians had only one rehearsal before their first concert. Hibiki was recorded in Berlin at the third of four performances on the tour. This is a percussive music, based on the sound of hammers on keys, mallets on bars, and sticks on skins and cymbals. The sound is alternately quiet and ruminative, lyrical and flowing, thunderous and ecstatic. Oshima's title track, which opens the set, and Fujii's "Yozakura" showcase the band's dynamic range most advantageously.

In the couple of years since her arrival in the Big Apple, the youthful Tennessee saxophone prodigy Zoh Amba has recorded with heavyweights like John Zorn, William Parker, and Tyshawn Sorey. While Bhakti, for Mahakala Music, best captures the power and luminous spirituality of her live performances (which one observer compared to "hearing Albert Ayler in the body of Scout Finch"), my favorite remains O, Sun for Zorn's Tzadik label (home to some of my favorite sides by Wendy Eisenberg, Petra Haden, and Mary Halvorson as well as Amba), which to these feedback-scorched ears just works better as a record with its shorter, more digestible pieces.

Amba's latest, The Flower School, brings her together with noise-rocker turned electric "American primitive" guitarist Bill Orcutt, on his Palilalia label. The fulcrum in this trio is punk-jazz drummer Chris Corsano, a frequent duo partner of Orcutt's who'd just finished a tour with Amba when The Flower School was recorded. Orcutt does a lot of sympathetic droning here; his recent solo acoustic Jump On It is a better place to hear more of what he brought to Rubber Gloves back in 2022. Amba moves the big column of air, as she's wont to do, and there's plenty of light and shade in these proceedings as well. She even plays acoustic guitar to Orcutt's electric on a gentle rustic pastoral interlude at the end of the first side. Until Zoh comes back to Texas, this is where I'll go to hear her. Her music's a healing balm.

Guitarist-songwriter-singer Wendy Eisenberg does so many things so well that one can imagine her having "the Neil Young problem": Folks who dig her "song" albums like Time Machine, Auto, and Bent Circle might show up for one of her stirring instrumental blowouts like the one that kicked the door open for Molten Plains Fest in Denton last week, and wind up running from the room with their hands over their ears like all the Harvest fans did when Old Neil had Sonic Youth open for him back in the '90s. 

Fans of ferocious skronk, and those of catholic taste, now have Balloon of Ruin -- a cassette on Stephen Lucas and Sarah Ruth Alexander's new imprint Joan of Bark Productions -- to appreciate. Balloon of Ruin is nothing less than the studio representation of the unit that opened Molten Plains. And a muscular, brawling beast of a session it is. Eisenberg churns up a whirlwind of sound, drummer Stefan Gonzalez is a freewheeling dynamo, and the aforementioned bassist Damon Smith -- catalyst for so much of worth on the current improv landscape -- provides the thunder to their lightning. Bold, bracing stuff, and an auspicious beginning for Joan of Bark.