Bobo Stenson Trio: Cantando

Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson rarely puts a finger wrong, and his ability to draw a Nordic hush from the unlikliest of material often has critics eating out of his right hand. Here his new-look live trio — with longtime bassist Anders Jormin and feted drummer Jon Fält — make their endlessly engrossing studio debut, titling their efforts, rather misleadingly perhaps, in Spanish. Though the album opens with a piece from Cuban Nueva Trova veteran, Silvio Rodriguez, and paces Astor Piazolla’s “Chiquilin de Bachin” midway through, both covers are couched in the kind of precipitative, note-perfect sobriety Stenson has made his own, and in which he loses himself throughout, not least on two readings of Peter Eben’s “Song of Ruth”. It’s through a mesmeric arrangement of an old Don Cherry number, though, that Stenson, Fält and Jormin really lock in to the clarity their music so often seems to be driving at; an incantatory vision of African-rooted repitition and Northern disconsolation, Don’s Corapiece is the sound of Stenson in bittersweet limbo.