You don’t have to look too hard through the recorded history of jazz to see that a stable group can do wonders for a musician’s growth as a composer, improviser, and conceptualist. But a variety of commercial and circumstantial pressures make it devilishly hard to sustain them over the long haul. The reappearance of certain musicians — guitarist Marc Ducret, pianist Russ Lossing, bassists Drew Gress and Bänz Oester, drummers Gerald Cleaver and Gerry Hemingway — throughout trombonist Samuel Blaser’s discography suggest that he is well aware of the benefits of having familiar faces with him when he makes a record.

This trio is not his core recording ensemble. In fact, until he, Ducret, and drummer Peter Bruun checked into the Centre Culturel ABC in November 2016, they were his NON-recording ensemble. For a time, Blaser admits, “I liked the idea of only being able to hear the band in a live setting.” Between 2013 and the 2020 they played around 150 gigs on three continents, booked mostly on the strength of YouTube and Soundcloud links. But eventually the recording industry took interest in the trio. “Werner Uehlinger from Hatology was pushing me to record the trio and submit a master tape for a release.” In 2018, the label issued a set recorded the previous year at the Taktlos Jazz Festival.

If that CD revealed the trio’s adroit management of shape and space, the ABC session shows that the musicians had other tricks up their sleeves. It begins with a thrilling exercise in sustained invention. They keep Ducret’s “L’Ombra di Verdi” in motion for over 25 minutes through acts of subtraction, with one player after another holding back while the other two engage in robustly challenging exchanges. The languid melody of Bruun’s “Svesker” feels like a change of pace, but the group find moments of tense uncertainty as they navigate away from its theme. Igor Stravinky’s “Fanfare For A New Theatre” is the only composition repeated from Taktlos Zürich 2017. But instead of using it as a brief introduction for another tune, they revisit the theme again and again, finding new angles each time. On “The Rain Only Drums At Night,” the first Blaser original on Volume 1, he and Ducret work in such close formation that one keeps listening to Bruun to see how he finds a place for himself in such intimate company. The paradoxically jaunty swing of his contributions provides one perfect solution, but he proves equally adept at subtle shading on “Aquarelle,” which emphasizes the singing quality of Blaser’s playing.

Bill Meyer