10 Sketches for Piano Trio

Tim Friese-Greene has definitely been around the block. He was an “unofficial” member — but a key songwriter — of Talk Talk, engineer for the Sex Pistols, and producer of extreme eighties cheese via The Nolan Sisters and Tight Fit. In the ’00s he produced a stream of indie/krautrock instrumentals as Heligoland but for this 2009 album, took yet another sharp left turn with what is ostensibly a jazz record. At least, the instrumentation (piano, double bass and drums) and playing style (technically precise, improvised) are jazz — but it is singularly lacking in jazz cliché from any era. These are tidy, even austere, “sketches,” each one precisely unfolding a particular musical idea without ornamentation, and rarely in more than three minutes. Like eavesdropping on an intense conversation between witty philosophers, it’s a bracing but edifying listen.