Pianist Alan Benzie won the Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the Year prize when he was a 17-year-old schoolboy, and became a star pupil at Boston’s famous Berklee jazz school – Traveller’s Tales is his debut album, featuring 10 originals delivered by his regular working trio. Though the phrasing of giants such as Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau unsurprisingly appears in glimpses, Benzie doesn’t sound like a young artist struggling for a voice – he displays a confidence that his Berklee lessons with the individualist pianist and composer JoAnne Brackeen almost certainly nurtured. There’s an affecting sense of place in the quiet ostinatos and modulations of Hazy Dawns or the child-song theme and Mehldau-like elisions of A Wandering Mist – but with drummer Marton Juhasz and bassist Andrew Robb (Benzie’s prize-winning former schoolmate), the trio fire up plenty of dynamism too, as the warmly waltzing Glass rises in ensemble fervour, the calypso-like Frog Town on the Hill builds to call-and-response swaps, and they all stretch out on the loose and anthemic Old Haunts. An independent Scotland has plenty of meanings in the jazz world too, and Alan Benzie is on his way to adding new ones.
