By all accounts one of the hits at last year's Cork Jazz Festival, Lynne Arriale is yet another in the seemingly endless procession of exceptional young pianists to emerge in recent years. Not as adventurous as Brad Mehldau, who is still, for many, the standard bearer - or as obviously visceral as Rodney Kendrick, Kevin Hays, Walt Weiskopf or Benny Green, she has nevertheless already staked out a place as one of the most consistently lyrical of them all.
And she has done it by putting her formidable technique, melodic inventiveness and her, at times, almost ethereal harmonic sensitivity at the service of the material. With her evident, though understated, individuality, indulgence seems to play no part in her music. Her three trio CDs - The Eyes Have It (1993), When You Listen (1994) and With Words Unspoken (1996) - show an unfolding concern with a group performance in which all three voices contribute vitally to the music. The piano may be, in the nature of things, primus inter pares, but bass and drums are expected to be more than mere accompanists.
There's nothing new in the idea; Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Keith Jarrett and others are part of a tradition going back a half century and now carried on by such as Arriale and Mehldau and, more spasmodically, Jessica Williams. But it does make for diversity and, in Arriale's case, the expression of a sensibility as muscular as it is poetic, in which the almost unalloyed romanticism of her first CD has gradually been tempered by something stronger and deeper.
Partly, this is the inevitable consequence of growth as an artist. Her rise has been swift; classically trained, she got a Master's degree from the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music before winning the 1993 International Great American Jazz Piano Competition, and since then has toured widely through Europe and North America to increasing acclaim.
Equally swift has been her growing command of the jazz idiom. But there is also the role played by her drummer, Steve Davis (who will be in Dublin with her). An ever-present on her trio CDs, he is a powerful influence on her playing, commenting on, underlining and prodding her ideas into fresh areas, constantly nudging her musical reticence towards the more overt.
It makes for a fruitful tension in her work, insinuatingly exemplified in her magisterial third CD; that she can tackle material as disparate as Monk's Think Of One, Gillespie's Woody n'You, her own excellent compositions, Gershwin's I Loves You Porgy, Richard Rodgers' Where Or When and, above all, Jimmy Rowles' masterpiece, The Peacocks, and make them her own and the group's, is tribute to the outstanding talent that will be on display in Dublin next week.