Portrait With in

Pianist Piero Bassini is equal parts McCoy Tyner and Andrew Hill in influence, but thoroughly his own man in the keys. With his trio comprised of bassist Luca Garlaschelli and virtuoso drummer Ettore Fioravanti, Bassini runs through his large book of colors, timbres, and curiously seamless harmonics. Featuring seven pieces, all Bassini compositions, Portrait With In is a stellar exploration of the reaches of the keyboardist's love of angular arpeggios, striated architectures of intervallic whimsy, and modal, open-toned note clusters that provide drones in the low register as a keynote for Garlaschelli and skittering skeins of chords and middle register triplets for accent in all the right places. The standouts are the two bookends of the album, "Explorations 1" and "Explorations 2," where the hill influence of flying over the keyboard in search of the right tonal equanimity meets the Tyner exegesis of large open chords that hover around the minor fifth and seventh edges for a murky kind of darkness. But there is also "Triangular Visions," where Bassini turns his crisscrossing harmonics in on themselves by building triads in the middle register and shifting them into 16th-note triplet runs against flatted ninths at the low ends of the register, producing a buzzing but bell-like drone for the rhythm section to — barely — hold on to. There isn't a dull note on this stellar collection that is as well sequenced as it is produced and played. Bassini is one of the finest pianists in a country filled with them, and dare I say it, one of the most inventive composers in modern jazz the world over.