Venezuela's jazz brothers

Among these are the Cuban Gonzalo Rubalcaba, the Brazilian Edsel Gomez and the Panamanian Danilo Perez. With them are two Venezuelans, Luis Perdomo and Edward Simon.

I first encountered Perdomo through his accomplished playing on Ravi Coltrane's most recent album In Flux, where his bold, crystalline notes flash out beside the tenorist's complex sonic pathways.

Now he has his own album called Awareness (RKM), which is in itself a hive of inventiveness. Coltrane is with him again, this time as his record's executive producer.

Perdomo comes from a big city - Caracas - and his music carries its sense of sound and its creative audacity. On five tracks, he doubles bass and drums, so that two bassmen (Hans Glawischnig and Henry Grimes) and two sets of drums played by Eric McPherson and Nasheet Waits mean that Perdomo has to negotiate his keyboard lines with a special adventurousness.

Grimes, in particular, is a musician of some legend. Hear him, for example, playing with Sonny Rollins in 1959 on his Big Brass album, or with Roy Haynes and Roland Kirk on Out of the Afternoon in 1962 - or Albert Ayler's Greenwich Village session of 1967.

But listen to the first notes of the first track. Perdomo's signature is strident, lucid and powerful. His notes penetrate, so that the double rhythm section never perturbs him, only drives him deeper into the fullness of his music. The assurance and potency continues with the single bass and drums of Glawischnig and McPherson on Nomads and the slower Ishtar, where Perdomo digs out his notes with a muscled will.

On Street View: Westside, Grimes's bass sounds truly cavernous and the two drummers mesh like long-time comrades of jazz before Perdomo enters for a concluding flourish. Song of the Forgotten is a keynote track, as Perdomo strikes out his notes with slow-burning anguish, beside bowed basses and tingling cymbals, compelling the listener to ask who and where are these "forgotten," for they sound very close.

Very rarely do you hear a piano hit so hard yet with such creative effect as in the opening notes of Shake the Broom or again in Street View: Pow Wow. It is as if Perdomo is a third drummer - an impression made again in Tribal Dance, where the amalgam of percussive artistry and shimmering bowed bass makes marvels for the ears and concludes an album of rare strength and beauty.

Edward Simon's album The Process (Criss Cross) stays with the trio construct of piano, bass and drums - Simon, John Patitucci and Eric Harland.

Simon too has a profoundly distinctive sound. Born in the small town of Cardon, on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, his father, noting his son's musical skills, sent him to the Philadelphia Performing Arts School, where his interest veered towards the great jazz pianists from Bud Powell to Chick Corea to Keith Jarrett and McCoy Tyner.

And there is certainly more than a touch of Powell in his boppish opener Navigator.

Calabria is Patitucci's piece and features his mellow, skipping bass. At the heart of the album is Simon's Venezuelan take on the blues, called, appropriately, Azules.

In the sleeve notes, he declares that his musical objective is "to reharmonise, to squeeze the juice out of each note" and Azules shows how he achieves it, with succulent Caribbean effect.

Simon loves his people's folk music. In his Tonado del Cabrestrero, he takes the "tonado" form - sung by farmers to their goats or cows to calm them before and during milking - and transforms it to a jazz opus of vibrant life and reinvention, with the exquisite partnership of Patitucci and his bowed bass.

Yet, when he turns to bop evergreens, such as Dizzy Gillespie's Woody'n'You, he is every inch the sparkling jazz musician, steeped in the whole music of the Americas. His "process" is to absorb all, in order to play from that entirety. And he is, year by year, achieving just that.

CHRIS SEARLE