This piano-trio session is Italian pianist Pacorig’s first as a leader, though he has recorded a few discs before as a sideman or co-leader. His most obvious debt is to the trio music of Paul Bley, though the Italian is in many ways working to a different agenda. Bley is the master of suspension in jazz, a sustained lack of resolution that gives even his loveliest or most quiescent performances the sense of a challenge to the listener and to the other musicians – one might even call it perverseness. Pacorig’s gestures are far more sharply etched and conclusive – indeed, what’s remarkable about this disc is the absence of wasted gesture. Pacorig likes the short form; of the five fully improvised tracks here, only one is outside the two- to three-minute range. Many improv albums include a few quickie explorations of an isolated idea or texture as bagatelles or just as breathers; but Pacorig and his companions (bassist Giovanni Maier and drummer Zeno de Rossi) approach the mini-improv form as if aspiring to give it the fullness and shapeliness of a short story. The pieces thus have an impact out of proportion to their duration: the tumultuous “Fastair,” for instance, is as eventful and visceral as any thirty-minute free-jazz marathon.

Pacorig’s originals range from the fastpaced “The legendary Hasaan” (in tribute to the pianist who recorded a 1964 trio album with Max Roach much prized by collectors and then returned to obscurity) to the slightly bent tango “Downtown” and the slinky “L’orso.” Strategically positioned among the originals and improvs is a pair of Ornette Coleman tunes. Pacorig has obviously thought hard about how to approach this exacting and highly unpianistic body of work. Counter to expectations, these two pieces are delivered with some of the thickest voicings on an otherwise quite spare album. “Peace” is darkened in mood from Coleman’s original reading: Pacorig’s statement of the theme builds to rich chords that suggest a church organ, at which the previously languorous bass and drums lash out like rattlesnakes. “WRU” is punched out to a funky beat: Zeno de Rossi’s brilliantly herky-jerky drumming sounds like Joey Baron tripping over himself.

A pleasure from start to finish, My Mind Is On the Table is an auspicious debut for the pianist.

Nate Dorward

Coda, Sep/Oct 2003