Drummer, composer and all-round Scottish-music enabler Tom Bancroft unveiled Trio Red with First Hello to Last Goodbye in 2012 – a jubilant debut recorded on the first day Bancroft, pianist Tom Cawley and Norwegian bassist Per Zanussi ever played together, and the chemistry still simmers on this fine follow-up. On a skipping dance through Charles Mingus’s Jump Monk, Cawley’s imagination and farsighted improv logic drive a solo of constantly refreshed directions, while pulsing muted-piano throbbings, arco-bass whirrs and percussion flappings smartly mimic electronics on Acoustic Electronica. Paul Simon and George Gershwin merge in the seductive 50 Ways Our Love Is Here to Stay Porgy and the late Thomas Chapin’s Lift Off is wayward postbop. The long title track, meanwhile, is an elegiac tone poem of low trills, bass bowings and floating rhythms written by Bancroft for Georgia’s National Big Band, following that country’s civil war in the early 1990s. A welcome reunion for an unpretentious trio of very classy musical equals.
