1. Out of the Blue
2. That Russian Thing
3. Home Row
4. Big Mouth
5. Walz Macabre
6. Zeitgeist
7. Church of the Open Air (for Bo Harbison)
8. In the Wheelhouse
9. Black Nile
10. Gitchee Gumee

Zeitgeist is a loaded word. In English it’s usually taken to mean the spirit of the times, but in the original German it has various, more subtle shades of meaning. One refers to the ethos of a particular group of people, a shared approach to thinking about or tackling something. So when drummer and leader, Kevin Brady, and his cohorts, pianist Bill Carrothers and bassist Dave Redmond, settled on Zeitgeist for their album’s title, this is what they probably had in mind. And there’s no doubt but that the music here represents a similar meeting of minds. If this piano trio has a model, it’s the kind of interactive democracy of the original Bill Evans trio of the late 50s, with all three instruments contributing to the dialogue. But nobody here is cloning Evans, Scott La Faro or Paul Motian. Any influences they may have as individuals are now so finely filtered that they’re like obscure genes on some remote strand of their cultural DNA. What you get now is the sum total of what makes them the musicians they are...

If anything sums up this trio it’s this sense of trust your instincts. Carrothers, rightly regarded by his peers as one of the finest jazz pianists of his generation, knows the musical rules but has always trusted his instincts and encouraged others to do the same. And Brady did likewise when he zeroed in on those qualities in the pianist and in Redmond. Zeitgeist sounds like they got the album’s title just right.

Ray Comiskey writes on jazz for The Irish Times

Kevin Brady – Drums
Bill Carrothers – Piano
Dave Redmond – Bass
Produced by Kevin Brady

Album engineered & recorded by Dave McCune, The Ventry Recording Studios, Balbriggan, Co. Dublin. December 2008.

Mixed & Mastered by Thomas Schmidt & Kevin Brady at Schmidt-Thon
Studios, Munich, Germany, January 2009. www.schmidt-thon.de
Photography by Graham Smith.
Art direction and design by dseny. www.dseny.es