City Life: Music of Gregg Hill

4 1/2 STARS Jazz trios featuring a horn, bass and drums get right to the core of musical expression. With, most commonly, a saxophone—see Sonny Rollins' blueprint for the horn and trio setting, the 1957 Contemporary Records album Way Out West—the music flows freely. The player do not need to chase chords around. The result is a stretching of the melodies with freewheeling rhythmic finesse.

Trombone, bass and drums outings are rare, but Michael Dease goes for it on CD 1 of City Life: Music of Gregg Hill , his third outing in which he tips his hat to the composer. Bassist Linda May Han Oh (aka Linda Oh) and drummer Jeff Tain Watts are his rambunctious fellow city dwellers. On CD 2, Dease again employs Oh and Watts, with the addition of pianist Geoffrey Keezer and saxophonist Nicole Glover. Maintaining the core trio keeps things cohesive—a key to the project's success.

Double CD outings say that the artist offering up all this music possesses a special confidence. This is a lot to take in at once. Dease fits into the confidence mode by offering a big two-disc statement..

CD 1 of City Life showcases Dease as a freewheeling, garrulous player. The push and pull between him, Oh and Watts is tricky, like a wrestling match loosely choreographed as they dip into the Hill songbook with chips on all six shoulders. Besides eight tunes from Hill's pen, Dease also includes J.J. Johnson's "Sweet Georgia Gillespie" (it cannot be a trombone album without a tune from Johnson, the Trombone Master), and one from saxophonist Sharel Cassity, "Say Whaaat?"

On two tunes, "Movie Theme" and "Movie Theme (reprise)," Johnson's nine-year-old daughter, Brooklyn, joins the band. Brooklyn Dease (with a presumed steady paternal mentorship and a good hand in mixing booth), nails her contributions, her wordless vocals sounding somewhat like a soprano saxophone with a cloth rubber banded over the bell to soften the straight horn's sometimes harsh tone. She blends marvelously with her father's trombone. They may do this at home.

Disc 2 is the sound of blustery freedom within the elastic confines of straight-ahead jazz, digging deep into the tradition with the addition of Keezer and Glover. Dease adds a couple of his inspired compositions, and he brings in a tune from saxophonist Gregory Tardy and one from guitarist Emily Remler. The music bubbles and bounces, with the hustle-bustle of city life in a set of deftly arranged tunes in which extended and inspired solos all around fill the bill.

Dease is a powerhouse player—the trombone invites the powerhouse mode. But he also shows a gentle and ruminative side on tunes like Hill's "Enigma" and the smooth flow of "Rainy Afternoon."

Either disc, packaged separately, could have made for a great album. Together with the sequencing, placing the two ensemble configurations on separate CDs, they offer a superb listening experience.