"Paul Bley once said that, if you want to change the music, you have to change the conventional jazz instrumentation. Jummy Giuffre did it excluding the drumkit from his trios, one of them precisely with Bley, and now Stephen Gauci, Kris Davis and Michael Bisio adopt the formula for a new welcomed deviation from the norm. As expected, the absence of a rhythmic driving instrumentalist mutates drastically the parameters of the music played: everything gets much freer, and at the same time it takes a chamber, clean, almost classical, flavor - even when the focus is on "groovin' for the hell of it", one of the CD subtitles. If there's a tenor saxophone, a piano and a double bass, like with the Giuffre's trio in 1961, stylistically what we find in Three have other premisses and objectives. First of all, and except for a Bisio's composition, all tracks are entirely improvised. So, this is something else, formally and organizationally. Only the musical language used, jazz, connects the proceedings with history, and if Gauci, Davis and Bisio are true innovators, they deal with the tradition. After all, Stephen Gauci had Joe Lovano, George Garzone and Frank Wess as masters, all of them guardians of the tenor lineage, Kris Davis is a remarkable heir of the third stream ambition to combine contemporary music and jazz elements, and Michael Bisio is the present day contrabassist more akin to Charlie Haden's lyricism." -CF