Anat Fort is an Israeli jazz pianist with a Jarrett-inspired touch and phrasing, and a composer with a knack for deceptively simple-sounding tunes that are usually elegant and frequently exquisite. Her trio made the beguiling And If for ECM in 2010, but 2004’s A Long Story, with clarinetist Perry Robinson, was the story that particularly bore revisiting – so Birdwatching augments her group with another superb clarinetist here, in Italian maestro Gianluigi Trovesi. The title steers the set, as sunrise is evoked in quietly stirring solo-piano harmonies and the emergence of pert and bobbing clarinet phrases, a storm in swooping glissandi and cymbal showers, and courtship in the call-and-response between Trovesi and Fort in Song of the Phoenix. Trovesi’s rapturous timbres and impetuous phrasing often make him earthily operatic, and he and Fort improvise animatedly on Murmuration without stepping on each other’s toes. The rolling, rapidly modulating It’s Your Song is Fort at her most Jarrettish, and for many it’ll be the indispensable track.
