Remember the excitement you first felt drawing circles as a kid? That profoundly innocent sense of being able to construct anything inside, outside, on, or upon those circles? Faces, trees, noses. Birds. bees, roses. A wide, westward, indigo sky. A fathomless blue ocean of liquid imagination. That's what it's like when you fully and gratefully engage with NYC based pianist/composer Yaniv Taubenhouse's third go round Moments In Trio Volume Three: Roads.
With his fiercely limber rhythm mates, bassist Rick Rosato and drummer Jerad Lippi, the pianist's elegant musings evolve like a lived-in winter's day. A squall here, a flurry there. But they never leave you cold like some artisans…

Anyone with an antenna out for an exciting, new(ish) piano trio would do well to give Yaniv Taubenhouse a listen. The Israeli-born and now New York-based pianist offers up his third recording, tagged Perpetuation: Moments In Trio Volume Two, bringing to mind Brad Mehldau's five Art of the Trio recordings on Warner Brothers Records, released between 1997 and 2001.
Taubenhouse studied with Mehldau, and the disc's opening title tune has a Mehldau-ian feel, with a persistent but understated rhythm pushing a wandering melody ahead. A lovely, inward mood pervades, with the pianist locked into sonic symbiosis with drummer Jerad Lippi and bassist Rick Rosato…