Bagatelles Vol 6: Brian Marsella Trio
John Zorn
John Zorn’s The Bagatelles Vol. 6: Brian Marsella Trio presents a set of his compact “bagatelle” compositions reimagined as explosive, tightly knit piano‑trio music. Written as part of a larger book of some 300 short tunes Zorn composed between March and May 2015, these pieces are designed as springboards: concise melodic cells, rhythmic figures, and harmonic fragments that invite extreme variation and spontaneous restructuring in performance. In this volume, they are channeled through pianist Brian Marsella and his long‑time Zorn‑affiliated rhythm section, bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Kenny Wollesen, whose collective experience in his projects gives the music an immediate sense of shared language and trust.
The trio’s interpretations move rapidly between driving swing, tender ballad writing, free‑jazz outbursts, and more exotic, mood‑driven vignettes, often within a single piece. Marsella’s piano playing combines fleet, virtuosic runs with a strong sense of lyricism, so that even the densest passages retain an underlying melodic thread, while Dunn and Wollesen shift effortlessly from hard‑pulsing time to open, coloristic textures, creating the feeling of “telepathic” interplay that has become a hallmark of this band. As a result, the album functions both as a showcase for Zorn’s bagatelle concept—short forms that generate large improvisational worlds—and as a portrait of a trio whose chemistry turns those terse notated ideas into a vivid, narrative listening experience, alternately fiery, playful, and unexpectedly intimate.
Bagatelles Vol 6: Brian Marsella Trio
John Zorn
John Zorn’s The Bagatelles Vol. 6: Brian Marsella Trio presents a set of his compact “bagatelle” compositions reimagined as explosive, tightly knit piano‑trio music. Written as part of a larger book of some 300 short tunes Zorn composed between March and May 2015, these pieces are designed as springboards: concise melodic cells, rhythmic figures, and harmonic fragments that invite extreme variation and spontaneous restructuring in performance. In this volume, they are channeled through pianist Brian Marsella and his long‑time Zorn‑affiliated rhythm section, bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Kenny Wollesen, whose collective experience in his projects gives the music an immediate sense of shared language and trust.
The trio’s interpretations move rapidly between driving swing, tender ballad writing, free‑jazz outbursts, and more exotic, mood‑driven vignettes, often within a single piece. Marsella’s piano playing combines fleet, virtuosic runs with a strong sense of lyricism, so that even the densest passages retain an underlying melodic thread, while Dunn and Wollesen shift effortlessly from hard‑pulsing time to open, coloristic textures, creating the feeling of “telepathic” interplay that has become a hallmark of this band. As a result, the album functions both as a showcase for Zorn’s bagatelle concept—short forms that generate large improvisational worlds—and as a portrait of a trio whose chemistry turns those terse notated ideas into a vivid, narrative listening experience, alternately fiery, playful, and unexpectedly intimate.