The Howard Riley Trio

Overground
(Emanem)

Howard Riley and Jaki
Byard

Feathers With Jaki
(Slam)
Howard Riley
Two Is One

(Emanem)

YORKSHIRE’S a jazz county, that’s for sure, and often a liberated zone of improvised music too.

In the ’60s the Joseph Holbrooke Trio, a threesome of iconoclastic Sheffielders — guitarist Derek Bailey, bassist Gavin Briars and drummer Tony Oxley — pushed jazz as far out as it conceivably could go at the time, and another Yorkshireman, the alto saxophonist Trevor Watts, was one of the founders of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble.

Tyke guitarist John McLaughlin moved Stateside in 1969 and almost immediately found himself taking a vital part in Miles Davis’s breath-defying In A Silent Way session as the harbinger of a stellar jazz life, but perhaps less exposed and celebrated than his other Yorkshire confreres despite his singular originality and brilliance is the Huddersfield-born (in 1943) pianist Howard Riley, who has been cutting utterly distinctive keyboard sounds since his first album Discussions in 1967.

Riley has combined piano and teaching for much of his life. He has taught at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Goldsmith’s College while performing and making some key albums.

Overground is certainly one of them, recorded in 1974-5 with Oxley and bassist Barry Guy, who was with him on Discussions.

The concept of free music as discussion or colloquy, with each musician engaged in free and equal democratic interchange in the creation of one, united sound universe, radiates powerfully from Riley’s music.

No one musician dominates, each is interlocutor and vital to the other.

In Overground, wrote Riley, the trio tracks “show a general evolution to the point where all three of us were using electronically altered as well as acoustic/amplified sounds” to create sheer improvisation.

The artistry is astonishing: Riley strikes out separate, multi-chiming notes, Oxley’s fluttering cymbals, electronic percussion and complex skittering surface strikes and rolls create a sonic undergrowth and Guy’s bass ploughs and tills the earth, making it speak.

Hear their engrossing timbral debate, for example, on the third track, Spliced, and follow the meaning of their sounds.

In 1984 Riley played in a piano duo at the Royal Festival Hall with the prodigious US pianist and master of styles from stride to bop to free — Jaki Byard.

They played two celebrated Monk tunes — Round Midnight and Straight, No Chaser.

These have been combined with seven more tracks recorded in 1988 of a trio with Riley, bassist Mario Castronari and drummer Tony Marsh to make the album Feathers With Jaki.

The meeting with Byard is phosphorescent.

The white man of West Yorkshire and the black man of Worcester, Massachusetts, play like long-lost brothers of piano.

Round Midnight is 17 minutes long and both pianists seem to be searching for its melody before it emerges mysteriously from the garden of sounds and a different sonic world form Overground.

It is still a “discussion” but one with a much more recognisable theme, as if the subject has been explicit, as it had, for decades of artistry by a New York genius who played his piano in his tiny apartment’s kitchen.

It was one of those rare Anglo-US jazz encounters like Benny Carter at Maida Vale, or Clayton with Lyttelton, Feldman with Adderley or Tracy with Rollins where race and nationality simply dissolve in the splendour of the music.

The trio tracks are compelling too — listen to the vaunting Swigger Swagger where Castronari’s bass twangs through Riley’s pounding notes or the gentle Feathers where Marsh’s cymbals contrast with the pianist’s chiming pillars of sound.

In 2005 Riley continued with the piano duo model to make the album Two Is One, but this time he was meeting himself with two pianos overdubbed.

As he writes in his sleevenotes: “I recorded the first piano as if it were a solo recording, then immediately added the second piano while reacting to the playback of the first.”

These are all relatively short “first-take” improvisations with the one familiar theme as Osoiretsim, a turnaround of Monk’s Misterioso, and the master is breathing through all these pieces, an array of double Monkisms played with inventive fire through a British prism with its very own angularities and amalgam of quadratic and melodic sounds.

Yorkshire, but a long way from Yorkshire too and full of the adaptive uniqueness of a very powerful piano spirit.