Bill Carrothers Trio

Village Vanguard; Thu 16–Sun 19

Photograph: Peg Carrothers

There are jazz hot spots outside New York, but Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is not among them. That’s where you’ll find pianist Bill Carrothers, who prefers the pleasures of family and nature to the high-priced hustle of the confining metropolis. Has this condemned him to obscurity? Let’s just say there are scores of big-city pianists who’d kill for a week at the Village Vanguard; Carrothers has landed one—bloodlessly, as far as we know.

Despite his geographic apartness, Carrothers has toured frequently in Europe and amassed an impressively varied discography. For the freely improvised Shine Ball he enlisted fellow Midwesterner David King, drummer for the Bad Plus. On Duets, the pianist entered into piquant dialogues with sought-after drummer Bill Stewart; with Ghost Ship, that duo welcomed saxophonist Anton Denner for a set of trio pieces without bass—quite a contrast with Home Row, a just-issued 1992 session featuring the two Bills with bass legend Gary Peacock. Nor should we forget Carrothers’s themed piano musings on the Civil War (The Blues and the Greys) and World War I (Armistice 1918).

Always a step ahead of easy classification, Carrothers is a master portraitist and sound poet with a slightly bent take on jazz heritage. And man, can he kill on ballads and burners, as he proves on his standards discs Swing Sing Songs and I Love Paris. At the Vanguard he’ll appear with the rhythm section from those two albums: Belgian bassist Nicolas Thys and Danish drummer Dré Pallemaerts.—David R. Adler

Buy I Love Paris on Amazon.com | Buy it on BN.com

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