Ace bass-player Jasper Høiby achieved fame with his band Phronesis, recording and performing sophisticated yet accessible jazz, and establishing themselves as leaders in the crowded piano trio field. With 3Elements, and new collaborators, he is continuing to explore the seamless and inspiring combination of composition and improvisation that has characterised his work to date.
The set started with solo acoustic bass: there were (probably unintentional) echoes of the North African gunbri, a lower register plucked string instrument favoured by the Gnaoua, a sect who use music and trance for healing. The gunbri’s particular timbre precipitates those who hear it into trance. An acoustic bass – which Høiby manages with remarkable grace – has a very different sound to an electric one – favoured by many of the best players today. There is that magical resonance native to the wood used in its construction. The same effect from the wood and animal skin in the African gunbri. It touches the heart in a way that even the best electric basses cannot. Høiby holds the bass delicately as if it were a fragile partner in a dance, not the heaviest and bulkiest of the string family, and nothing he does, at whatever tempo feels forced or challenging.
That gracefulness, where less means more, even at moments of scintillating excitement – there were plenty of those – is reflected in the feel of the trio’s music as a whole. Høiby is the leader - that's unquestionable - holding the centre, not just spatially on stage, but as a benign conductor, or the spiritual force animating all three of them, at all times. The music flows almost imperceptibly from composed and arranged moments to sections in which each musician stretches out, on a personal journey of improvisation, but only very occasionally breaking loose. The whole keeps together, each individual taking the lead in turn, but sustained by the others. The collective playing is often rooted in riffs, but never its subject: the repetition works as a core, but also as a launching pad for exciting off-piste flourishes from all three players.
Xavi Torres, the pianist, is not just a virtuoso, but a genuinely individual voice, with a stylistic range that is never just for show, but opens up avenues that constantly surprise. He does exquisite runs up and down the keyboard, plays in unison with Høiby’s bass, and punches away with block-chords. Most jazz pianists trained in classical music, with Torres this is evident at various times, manifesting in melodic lines and timbres that contrast wonderfully well with the more muscly approach he moves into. At one point, he quickly sticks something into the instrument’s body ad delights with harmonic-rich prepared piano that mixes perfectly well with gently plucked bass and the drummer’s light strokes on the cymbals.
As drummers go, you could not wish for someone more suited to the role that Høiby clearly expects from all three of them: heart-stopping Naima Acuña offers undeniably individual presence, matched with a capacity to listen and to contribute rhythmic accents at the right moment, and to encourage the others to surpass themselves. She navigates on-the-edge-of-audible strokes of the cymbals, sharp rat-tat-tats on the rims of her snare drum and tom-tom, as well as polyrhythmic explosions when the three of them work towards a thrilling climax, and she channels the spirit of Elvin Jones.
Much of the music is modal, so there isn’t just the drummer’s first name “Naima”, the name of John Coltrane’s wife, Coltrane who was one of the pioneers of modal improvisation in jazz in the early 1960s, not least in the group with Elvin Jones. Jazz is a wonderful example of an art-form rooted in traditions, which are re-invented by each generation that has inherited the rich forms that keep it alive. Jasper Høiby and the 3Elements move with great passion through these constantly evolving forms, ways of making music collectively as a way of bringing people together, in conversation, that goes back to the music’s origins in Africa. Two Spaniards and a Dane, inhabit that ground as it if were theirs by birth. It is no surprise that the brilliant album they’ve just released is called "Conversations of Hope". As long as we can talk to each other, as Høiby passionately advised in one of his heartfelt song intros, there is indeed something to hold our collective courage afloat.
In “Safe Passage”, dedicated to all those whose circumstances have forced them to migrate, the trio are at their best – the passion they clearly feel about the source of inspiration they conjure shines from a majestic opening, in which Torres’s piano riff holds the space from a series of increasingly intricate flourishes from Acuña. This is just one moment in which the 3Elements demonstrate their exquisite power – a joyful sound in times of darkness.
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