The Super Jazz Trio - The Super Jazz Trio (1979 Japanese Baystate Vinyl LP)

The Super Jazz Trio (Tommy Flanagan, Reggie Workman, Joe Chambers) - The Super Jazz Trio | Vinyl LP - 1979 Japanese Baystate (RVJ-6033, Baystate Jazz Series)

Tommy Flanagan was the pianist other pianists revered, the man of impeccable taste who spent years as Ella Fitzgerald's music director and turned up on some of the most famous records ever made, Sonny Rollins's Saxophone Colossus and John Coltrane's Giant Steps among them. The Super Jazz Trio puts him in the setting that suited him best, a piano trio, with two heavyweight partners in bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Joe Chambers. It was recorded in New York in 1978 for Baystate, one of the Japanese labels that gave American players the budgets and the care the domestic industry no longer offered. The programme is a tour of the modern-jazz songbook, Sonny Rollins's "Pent Up House", Monk's "Let's Call This", Bud Powell's "So Sorry Please" and a limber "Milestones", with the long "Condado Beach" giving the trio room to stretch. Flanagan plays with his usual grace and unfailing swing, never a note out of place, and Workman and Chambers push him just hard enough to keep it exciting.

The Super Jazz Trio was Baystate's answer to the Great Jazz Trio that East Wind had built around Hank Jones, part of a small wave of supergroup piano trios the Japanese labels assembled in the late seventies, and this self-titled album was its first outing. The three musicians here are a study in how deep the jazz talent pool ran: Flanagan on countless classics, Workman out of John Coltrane's early-sixties band, Chambers a Blue Note mainstay and composer.

This is the 1979 Japanese original on Baystate, catalogue number RVJ-6033, part of the Baystate Jazz Series.