Geof Bradfield keeps his music lean and his options wide open. The template is Rollins’ marvellous stripped-down trios of the late 1950s, but Bradfield doesn’t mimic Rollins’ combo of cliffhanger drama and expansive, sometimes cruel wit – he’s after a purer melodicism, silvery and limber and reaching up often into his (very clean) high register. Even at his most fiery Bradfield communicates as clearly and directly as if each line were set in type (sanserif, naturally). It’s the kind of album which suggests so many possible stylistic antecedents that to select just one or two is grossly misleading, but let’s land arbitrarily on Steve Lacy, whose lessons in distillation have evidently made a strong impression on Bradfield. Lacy is never namechecked, but he is very much the presiding spirit of the album’s first half: “Nichols’ Plated” is a doublebarrelled essay on Nichols and Monk, and the soprano feature “Koan” is a direct though unannounced homage to Lacy. (And is it coincidence that Lacy’s 1996 trio album Bye-Ya opens, like this disc, with a tribute to John Gilmore?) Bradfield doesn’t sidestep more ubiquitous and monolithic presences in the canon, either – besides Rollins, he tackles Trane on his own terms, too: the deep groove of “Contemplation” finds him scaling down Trane’s grave majesty to his own softer, more reticent way of speaking; “Happy” is a spirited revisitation of Trane’s Atlantic-period device of defamiliarizing standard chord progressions via movement in thirds (as the title indicates, the source here is “I Want to Be Happy”).

So much for sketchy musical genealogies. What’s more important is that Rule of Three makes no concession to the idea of tradition as a weight. These players – Bradfield, bassist Noel Kupersmith, drummer Ted Sirota on drums – don’t set out to “renovate” this material or this idiom, but simply get inside this music with a minimum of fuss. The results are fresher than many more elaborate and selfconscious revisitations of classic repertory and idioms. Bradfield’s compositions are spacious but sturdily built, and sit comfortably alongside Ellington’s “Day Dream” (a performance that’s wistful and grand by turns), Rollins’ “Paul’s Pal,” Andrew Hill’s “Reconciliation” (from the pianist’s Judgment), and Randy Weston’s charming “Berkshire Blues.” A quietly exhilirating album, and one of the more significant debut recordings of 2003.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, February 2004