The piano trio has always held a special place in my experience—and imagination—of jazz clubs. And the most exciting debut on record that I’ve heard in the last year is Micah Thomas’s trio, recorded live last spring at Kitano, a small club in New York. Still very young—a twenty-two-year-old student finishing a master’s at Juilliard—and quite unassuming, Thomas isn’t trying to reinvent the piano trio so much as to offer his own gloss on it. The album, Tide, is earnest, even a little old-fashioned; a sound more evocative of the 1960s—or perhaps of a young man’s dream of 1960s jazz—than of the 2020s.
