Matt Mitchell, Kim Cass, and Dan Weiss: Three Views of a Piano Trio

Matt Mitchell - Zealous Angles (Pi Recordings, 2024) *****

Kim Cass - Levs (Pi Recordings, 2024) ***** 

Dan Weiss - Even Odds (Cygnus Recordings, 2024) ***** 

By Lee Rice Epstein

Since 2021, we’ve seen three albums of previously unheard and little- or un-known music recorded by pianist Hasaan Ibn Ali. Mostly known (if at all) for a single piano trio album recorded under Max Roach’s name, Ibn Ali’s music fills a crucial gap in our understanding of the complex growth and development of the piano trio. In preparing to review these albums, I spent months revisiting dozens of trio recordings from Ibn Ali, Elmo Hope, Herbie Nichols, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Marilyn Crispell, Aki Takase, Craig Taborn, Matthew Shipp, and a few key contemporary players like Jason Moran and David Virelles. It would be challenging enough to develop a new grand theory of the piano trio—and anyway, most of my time spent was luxuriating in the music, dazzled by technique and inventiveness. All this listening was, however, in service of finding an entry point into writing about pianist Matt Mitchell and the music of Mitchell, bassist Kim Cass, and drummer Dan Weiss, particularly following Matthew Shipp Trio's exceptional New Concepts In Piano Trio Jazz , whose title begs questions Mitchell, Kim Cass, and Dan Weiss seem, unknowingly, to have many responses to. 

In a year when he released a landmark solo album, the relative success of Illimitable could have carried Mitchell well into next year, and yet here he is with the recorded debut of his longtime trio with bassist Chris Tordini and Weiss on drums. Much of what’s been written about Zealous Angles has, admirably (at least, it’s well beyond my technical knowledge), focused on the technical complexity of the compositions—polyrhythm, polymeter, and asynchronicity abound within the written material —and yet, maybe because I’m a contrarian by nature, I wanted to spend time specifically listening to this music in the context of its mode. Piano trios are fascinating in some ways because they’re like prisms: three sides with a fixed shape and seemingly infinite ways of refracting and projecting the approach. Mitchell has constructed ways to do this within the music itself and put it on display for listeners by providing alternate takes under new names, wholly fresh performances of the same music with different intentions and results—a decent amount of music gets replayed and reinterpreted by the trio, and the recurrence of thematic material late in the album gives the impression of a framing device or linked motif in a song cycle.

On Cass’s phenomenal Levs, with Mitchell and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, the trio brings more to the proceedings than merely bass, piano, and drums. In addition to some augmentation by Laura Cocks on flute and Adam Dotson on euphonium—with parts added separately—Cass also plays sampler and Mitchell plays Prophet-6 (one of many follow-ups to the classic Prophet-5 keyboard). Cass’s music is crunchy, which is to say it crackles with energy and showcases these dance-like rhythms that stutter-step across the drums and keyboards. And Cass’s bass sounds deep and rich in the mix, even has he’s taking sharp, surprising pivots along the strings. Just the briefest sidebar about Sorey here, there just are very, very few artists like him, and the textured approach he brings to the kit is as varied on Levs as it is on his own piano trio album from this year, The Susceptible Now, an album that, on the surface, sounds very far from Cass’s, adding to the ongoing discussion of just how many ways can that format be presented. But Sorey, much like Mitchell, has always been a player that I suspect more people think they have figured out than actually have a grasp on what’s happening in the music—both can swing just as madly as they groove, and Cass gives them plenty of room for both and then some.

Weiss, who already fronts a piano trio with Jacob Sacks and Thomas Morgan, mixes things up for Even Odds, bringing in alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón alongside Mitchell on piano. Even Odds is ridiculously addictive from the jump, one of the finest examples of just how far a “piano trio” can stretch to encompass a group’s ideas. One of Weiss’s gifts as a composer is how brilliantly he builds up a song to both amplify and challenge his musicians’ gifts. There are fleet, brisk tracks drawn from and inspired by several of jazz’s hall of fame drummers—as much as he sounds incredible as always, what these tracks really highlight, though, is his deep love for the music’s history. Zenón absolutely shines on this album. With a restrained, sorrowful approach on “The Children of Uvalde,” he plays exactly what’s needed to bring home this American tragedy without tipping into bathos. It’s a delicate enough challenge for any ballad, but on something so charged and emotionally raw, Zenón brings clarity and honesty, mourning without being overly mournful. Again, it’s a tribute as well to Weiss’s compositional gifts, where song structures bend and merge with deftness. Mitchell sounds relaxed throughout, settling deep into the spaces between the drums and alto. It’s a delightful deception, any close listening reveals how knotty and varied the keyboard runs can be, followed by clustered chords and fragile jabs.

If Shipp gave us a new concept in piano jazz, which is to say his trio playing an entirely new and varied set of music, then Mitchell, Cass, and Weiss are surely following with their own equally new and varied sets of music—as different from one another as could be. And we can just celebrate, no matter what else is happening, that art will continue, will challenge, will progress.