Dre Hocevar Trio - Coding of Evidentiality (2015)

"Jazz is indeed a universal language. The leader of this trio, drummer and composer Dre Hocevar, is Slovenian, the pianist, Bram De Looze, is Belgian, and the cellist, Lester St.louis, is American. Clearly the music here points to the future. Not only because of the musicians age but mostly because of their curious minds related to the fact that the three of them live in New York.

Hocevar, De Looze and St.Louis are under 30, and it's sufficient to say that Coding of Evidentiality is only the second opus by Hocevar and the first recording ever made by St.louis. The music reflects both conditions: it portrays a wide perspective of this idiom, combining an array of progressive compositional and improvisational approaches, and has that kind of freshness and naiveté (in the good sense) only possible when things are at its start.

At the same time, you notice that the references are clear in the world of drumming (a descendent of Tony Williams' capacity to go outside and back inside, Hocevar was a pupil of Michael Carvin and has Gerry Hemingway, Nasheet Waits and Tyshawn Sorey as his contemporaries) and that this is a mature, solid project, resulting from exquisite playing, historic awareness and audacious imagination. Rhythm and interaction methodologies are always the matrix, all the improvising has a compositional focus and the emphasis is on timbre. One of the pieces included is called "Post Resonance 1J7-36 " and that's a key factor here. Expect the unexpected isn't only the advice to the wise, in one track, of Sam Pluta's electronics..."-Clean Feed