Trio is the first ECM album by pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Sławomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michał Miśkiewicz. By then ECM listeners knew the three Poles as the rhythm section of the Tomasz Stańko Quartet, but at home they had long worked as a band of their own. This record introduced that band to the wider world, with a programme that sets originals and free improvisations beside music by Björk, Wayne Shorter and Karol Szymanowski.
Wasilewski and Kurkiewicz founded the group as students at the music high school in Koszalin in 1990, calling it the Simple Acoustic Trio. Miśkiewicz joined in 1993, and the line-up has not changed since. Their work with Stańko began around 1999 and 2000 and produced the ECM albums Soul of Things and Suspended Night. Trio was recorded in March 2004 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.
The album opens and closes with two collective improvisations called Trio Conversation, and further free pieces such as Entropy and Free Combinations for Three Instruments run between the tunes. Björk's Hyperballad is the best known of the borrowed songs. Roxane's Song comes from Szymanowski's opera King Roger and is played here without words, while Shorter's Plaza Real and Stańko's Green Sky complete the outside material. Writing in Fono Forum, Berthold Klostermann noted that bass and drums add free accents and colours instead of simply keeping time, so even the songs become open three-way exchanges.
The record entered the quarterly list of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik (2/2005) and was picked by Jazz Magazine, Piano Magazine and Stereoplay. In JazzTimes, Thomas Conrad heard the familiar after-midnight ECM aura, then added that "strikingly fresh are the moment-by-moment melodic epiphanies, the music's elusive implications of harmony". In Jazzwise, Stephen Graham pointed to "a sense of the miniature the best Polish jazz pianists manage to glean from Chopin". On later ECM albums, starting with January, the group appears as the Marcin Wasilewski Trio.
This is the CD edition, ECM 1891, first released by ECM in March 2005.
