Born in New Zealand in 1940, pianist Mike Nock has pursued a varied and successful career split between the States and Australia; Coda’s readers may know him among other things for his savvy curation of the Naxos Jazz series. On Changing Seasons, recorded in a Sydney studio with a (very nice-sounding) Australian-made piano, he joins forces with two younger Australian musicians, bassist Brett Hirst and drummer Toby Hall. The program is an intelligent mix of Nock originals, collectively-improvised pieces (not “free” playing but, so to speak, “convergent” playing: though unscripted the pieces each find a centre of gravity and tempo), and carefully personalized readings of the traditional “Black Is the Colour,” Wayne Shorter’s “E.S.P.,” and Richie Powell’s rarely-covered “Time.” It’s very well-played, and pieces like the opening “Three Dee” or the collective improvisations come across strongly; yet on balance the album is a disappointment. Nock’s approach to improvising is curiously weighted: sometimes his solos are more background than foreground, as if he were happy simply to colour in the chords at length (on “Black Is the Colour,” for example). When on other pieces his right hand spins out single-note lines, they are so gliding and unemphatic that one comes to hear them as decorations of the left-hand chords. And once the ear is drawn to those chords further problems arise: though Nock seems a capable technician, his left hand perpetually hugs the chords, with little change of emphasis or harmony. As a result the freshness tends to depart from the music as chorus follows chorus, and on the two dullest tracks the results are genuinely maddening: the precious Bill Evans pastiche of “Acceptance” (loosely modelled, it sounds like, on “Turn Out the Stars” and “In Your Own Sweet Way”) is trying enough the first time around, let alone by the time its chords have been driven home over seven minutes; and the nearly eight minutes of the vaguely gospelly “Drowning Joyfully” are enough to make you never want to hear parallel motion again.

Nate Dorward

Coda