Saturday night's concert by the Jacky Terrasson Trio was the final event of the ESB/New Note spring season at Vicar Street. Sadly, it was a disappointing conclusion to a very mixed series. Terrasson, an acclaimed young pianist heralded as part of the future of jazz, certainly dazzled the audience, but there was nothing here which had not been done before - and better - by others.
It was, at times, not far removed from supper club jazz in terms of its ingratiating niceness and accessibility. To be fair, the astringencies of the real thing were there, too, but the effect was as if, to borrow the critic and composer Constant Lambert's phrase, someone had laced the cocktails with meths. Thus Ravel could be segued into a blues, or an up-tempo original in 6/8 could metamorphose into a delicate Nature Boy.
In its way, this is symptomatic of Terrasson's tendency to find ideas, toy with and discard them without really developing them further. He also, like Ahmed Jamal, relies on repetition to build tension, and rather obvious extremes of volume to resolve it or provide contrast. He does have a magnificent technique, shown by the two-handed unison passages a la Phineas Newborn, and the ease with which he dealt with, for example, Parisian Thoroughfare, and an immense control of time, turning the same piece into a calypso with strong echoes of Sonny Rollins's St Thomas.
In fact, the real meat of the trio was in the interplay he enjoyed with his regular drummer, the brilliant Leon Parker, rather than with the somewhat self-effacing but excellent bassist, Sean Smith. However, with pieces like Que reste-t-ils de nos amours or La vie en rose, perhaps inevitably, woven into the fabric of an increasingly boring evening, it always seemed more like a case of hors d'oeuvres than the main course.
