Take the piano out of a small jazz group and watch the musicians scramble to maximize their rapport and leave nothing to chance.

Thus, Trio East, a group of jazz academics in upstate New York, manages to produce enough harmonic definition and richness of sonority among trumpet, bass and drums to make a keyboard seem almost superfluous.

The result courts peril when it gets into a teasing mood, as with the gradual coming-together of the theme in Dizzy Gillespie's "Con Alma."

Yet the title piece, by hard-bop trumpet titan Lee Morgan, gives lessons in how not to get anxious about filling in the gaps. It's frisky and fitfully aggressive, but doesn't take itself too seriously.

I would have liked bassist Jeff Campbell to be higher in the mix, but it's still easy to hear that he holds his own with trumpeter Clay Jenkins and drummer Rich Thompson. A former student of Peter Erskine, Thompson shares his teacher's deftness; his playing is largely responsible for the fact that the swift original "In Fine Line" manages to convey urgency without getting frantic.

Mal Waldron's "Soul Eyes" finds the trio committed to lyricism throughout, with smooth brushwork from Thompson. And there's a lyrical core to trumpeter Jenkins' playing not only in this ballad: In John Coltrane's "26-2," his nimbly articulated high-register passages never sound brittle or shrill.

— Jay Harvey
© Indianapolis Star, June 26, 2005