Jazz

Dave Bass Music · 2 October 2026

The second track is called “Toccata” (6:16) and it doesn’t begin with Bach. It opens on a passage of Dave Bass’s own and an arco interlude from Tyler Miles, and only then does the three-part fugue from the E minor Toccata come in. The trio moves in and out of the written lines, and what you hear from Bass is mostly single notes, no chords.

Eleven tracks, 50:24, with Miles on bass and Steve Helfand on drums. The opener, “Neither Have I Wings” (5:33), rides a Brazilian baião whose pulse lives in the bass, with Miles’s solo in the middle and Helfand’s sticks exactly where they should be. “Work” (6:02) is one of the less-played Thelonious Monk tunes and arrives with an altered introduction; it’s the track where Helfand gets the most room.

Three of the eleven are contrafacts, new melodies over existing chord changes. “Fingerprints-Gantry” (4:44) stacks two of them: Chick Corea’s “Fingerprints”, itself a contrafact of Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints”, working here as a twelve-bar blues in 6/4, paired with Bass’s gospel-rooted “Gantry”, sixteen bars in 4/4. “Lost Mambo” (4:40) comes off Juan Tizol’s “Perdido” and keeps the Cuban tumbao, and the closing “You Lose” (4:28) comes off Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin’s “If I Should Lose You” with every trace of romance taken out.

In the middle sits “When You Wish Upon a Star” (3:31), the Leigh Harline and Ned Washington song from the 1940 “Pinocchio”, reharmonised. Bach, Monk, Corea, Tizol, a baião and Disney all fit across eleven tracks, and this is the third volume of the same idea in three years — “Trio Nuevo” on 19 April 2024, “Vol. 2” on 2 May 2025. The catalogue of sources widens every time and the format never moves.

Self-released, like the two before it.

Rating: 7.0/10

Text by Aina Torrents