Autumn Music, Nabatov’s new trio disc with cellist Ernst Reijseger and drummer Michael Vatcher, continues the pianist’s engagement with the Amsterdam scene that was previously documented on his encounter with Han Bennink, Chat Room. The new disc’s title-piece is a 18-minute suite split into two continuous parts. The pingpong interplay of Part I yields to a ghostly, hesitant central interlude, then reaches a celebratory finish: you could mistake the heavy, inspirational chording at the close for D. D. Jackson if it weren’t for Nabatov’s residual melancholy and ambiguity. “For M.F.” (dedicated to Morton Feldman) is virtually static: tiny plinks and plops that fall from the piano like droplets from a twig above a pond, slowly working up to spread-out chords like those in Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet (1985); bowed cello and cymbal contribute an eerie, seething drone. “Hardly Obliged” is far more whimsical but has a similarly unhurried pace and stark opposition between piano and accompaniment: touchingly earnest piano; squiggly, demented cello and drums. Herbie Nichols’ “Lady Sings the Blues” is delivered with Mengelbergish slyness and faux-distractedness, with Vatcher clump-clump-clumping along and Nabatov sprinkling finicky high-register arabesques like dustings of powdered sugar, while cheerfully doing the odd bit of damage in the middle register. Reijseger’s “Third Stone” is grounded in a dark romanticism, but circles round it warily: the piece moves from tender song to freeform explosion to an absurd, over-the-top catharsis (complete with wordless vocal). Jobim’s “Valsa do Porto das Caixas” begins with a long piano cadenza, tremulous and otherworldly and a little overblown; bass and drums enter right at the end to give the tune a “nostalgic farewell” (as Nabatov comments in the liner notes).

For all its ingenuities Autumn Music is a slight disappointment: it’s a surprisingly lightweight album from a pianist responsible for such landmark discs as Tough Customer, Nature Morte and The Master and Margarita. Autumn Music is enigmatic, attractive and curiously insubstantial, leaving little impression on this listener – a Cheshire Cat of an album.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, January 2005