Bob Rusch is an indefatigable scout for new talent; with Trips Jobs and Journeys, the debut of pianist Noah Rosen, he’s scored a notable coup. Andrew Hill contributes enthusiastic liner notes, and Rosen shares Hill’s preoccupation with building enormously complex, abstract structures out of materials deriving ultimately from blues and gospel piano. One can also hear Taylor, early Bley, and the African piano of Ibrahim and Weston in Rosen's playing, but his closest affinity is with Mal Waldron: like Waldron, Rosen rarely strays out of the middle range of the keyboard, and spins performances of great length out of the smallest blues licks. In these trio performances with bassist Didier Levallet and drummer Makoto Sato, taped at two concerts in September 2000, Rosen is in no special any hurry to get anywhere: a single motif is patiently stated, obscured, then restated for the duration of a performance. He even reuses the same motifs: “Trips,” “First Journey” and “Second Journey” are in fact all the same piece, together comprising a bravura 38-minute display of repetition compulsion. Each phrase in his improvisations amounts to no more than a momentary, dissonant surface flicker over calm depths: the music has a curiously languid feeling, though there’s a half-buried gospelly roll to it too. Some listeners will find Rosen’s music infuriatingly static; but to my ear, Trips, Jobs and Journeys is among the past year’s freshest and most thought-provoking releases.

Nate Dorward

Coda