Meeting Place - Convergence
OVK3
Modica Music (modicamusic.bandcamp.com/album/meeting-point)
This album features an impeccable trio playing beautiful music where each musician shines individually, the air filled with distinctive sounds. Pianist-composer Manuel Valera contributes seven out of nine tunes here, each one being a piano trio’s dream. Left hand countermelodies and incredible rhythmic emphasis abundantly bring out the most dynamic of interactive tendencies within the group. OVK3’s sound embodies quietude, crispness and brightness in equal measure, skating briskly across the liberating open plane of Mark Kelso’s feathery ride cymbal, always in control, each hit bringing the picture into more life-like definition.
IKelso’s rhythmic gestures are open air and Valera’s ideas are the feeling of sudden lucidity while Roberto Occhipinti’s lines are pure butter, in the midst of a constant phase change each note placed in the most tender of places with an impossibly fluid throughline. There is the feeling of comfy tension where the listener ingests a meal numerous morsels at a time.
Occhipinti provides an original here, El Rey, and it is emblematic of something that never rests or ceases, and yet it leaves a firm, digestible imprint on the mind. The inclusion of Soul Eyes, track eight, made this Mal Waldron fan happy.
