Danse is the third ECM album by the Swiss pianist Colin Vallon and his trio, a group that has found its own place in the crowded field of the piano trio by quietly bending its conventions. Vallon leads without virtuoso display. He outlines melodies patiently and sets up frameworks in which the three musicians improvise in layers, so that a soft, insistent rhythm can slowly build into something much larger.
The trio here is Vallon on piano, Patrice Moret on double bass and Julian Sartorius on drums and cymbals. Moret has played with Vallon since 2004, while Sartorius joined for the previous ECM album, Le Vent, replacing Samuel Rohrer. The record was made in early 2016 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio engineering and Manfred Eicher producing. Vallon wrote nine of the eleven pieces, Moret contributed Tinguely, and Oort is credited to all three.
The opener, Sisyphe, turns on a steady, circling pulse, with Moret's bass stepping forward at one point to carry the melody. Tsunami starts from insistent piano figures and rises steadily, until its structure finally comes apart. In Moret's Tinguely the instruments lock into tight, interlocking rhythms and Vallon adds the sound of prepared piano. Oort is a short collective improvisation of icy piano and murky bowed bass. Elsewhere the mood turns lyrical, as in Kid, which Sartorius colours with fine cymbal work, and the brief Reste, which returns in a longer variation at the end.
Thom Jurek wrote at AllMusic that any listener looking for something different from conventional notions of the jazz piano trio "should investigate Switzerland's Colin Vallon Trio." In The Jazzmann, February 2017, Ian Mann heard "a thoroughly absorbing album that combines two different musical strands into a convincing whole." He placed the group's increasingly recognisable sound somewhere between two other ECM artists, Tord Gustavsen and Nik Bärtsch. In Fono Forum Karl Lippegaus traced the trio's sources from Radiohead and Metallica to Abdullah Ibrahim.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2517, first released on 13 January 2017, with cover and liner photographs by Nicolas Masson.
