CD Choice: JOHN TAYLOR *****
Whirlpool CamJazz

John Taylor has been a pianist of international stature for a long time, but in recent years he has reached a creative level remarkable even by his standards. Angel of the Presence, Taylor's 2005 CamJazz trio album with bassist Palle Danielsson and drummer Martin France, was just one example among many of his brilliance; it was also evidence of the outstanding nature of the trio he formed with them. Now, with the same players, he's done it again.

While the late Bill Evans trio is a model for the kind of group democracy over which Taylor presides, Evans is largely a spectral presence (occasionally glimpsed in the gorgeous approach to I Loves You, Porgy, for example) on Taylor's own piano. But Taylor is now emphatically his own man, with perhaps an even greater debt to his classical training than to Evans. There's a greater joie de vivre about him, too, to go with the poet's sensibility and the almost sensual pleasure of his sound, superbly captured in the opulent brightness of this recording.

Still, despite the sheer joy in playing that suffuses Whirlpool, there's a mainly reflective cast to the trio's work. It's supported by the choice of material, which includes three pieces by Kenny Wheeler, three by Taylor, and Holst's Christmas carol, In the Bleak Midwinter.

In a beautifully chosen programme, there are gems everywhere; in the relaxed mastery of the unbuttoned treatment of Wheeler's Everybody's Song But

My Own and the trio's supple dance through the rhythmic asymmetries of Taylor's Whirlpool, the meditative poise of Consolation and the lovely For Ada, which offers perhaps the best touches of the influence of classical music on his harmonic sense.

The trio reach a kind of summit with Taylor's The Woodcocks, where their pliant interaction is so potently woven that the performance seems completeness itself. Not a bad summation of something that is an early candidate for one of the CDs of the year. http://uk.hmboutique.com