Crooked Trio - De Luxe (2018)

Oscar Noriega (drums), Marta Sanchez (piano) and Jeong Lim Yang (bass) play their own book of standards.
In 2015, mutli-instrumentalist Oscar Noriega decided to form a piano trio that would be dedicated to playing jazz standards - and in which he would only play drums. Noriega is primarily known as a sax and clarinet player. He is a member of Tim Berne’s Snakeoil as well as Endangered Blood (with Jim Black, Trevor Dunn and Chris Speed) and co-leads the brass band Banda de Los Muertos with Jacob Garchik. Noriega had been playing drums for years, coached by many of his drummer friends (Jeff Davis, Ben Peroswsky, Ches Smith and a few others..) and playing drums was turning into a passion.

Noriega drafted his friends Jeong Lim Yang on bass and Marta Sanchez on piano and they started playing a weekly gig at Barbès, a Brooklyn club with which Noriega has been associated with since its very beginning.
Since then, Every Friday from 5 to 7:30, the Crooked Trio (straight booze and skewed standards as presented by Barbès….) has been refining its sound. The three musicians have played a very wide variety of contexts, many of which involved free improvisation, but for this project, they decided they wanted to go back to the classic piano trios they so admired. Their models were Duke Ellington, Herbie Nichols, Thelolonious Monk of Ahmad Jamal.
Over the years the weekly gig turned into became a convivial affair attended by Barbès regulars and a rotating casts of jazz musicians who could come and sit in. Little by little their reputation grew, and the trio became tight unit which drew in larger and larger crowds.

After three years, The Crooked Trio decided it was time they recorded an album. Recording the standards they’d been playing seemed somewhat redundant, as their heroes had already done so. As all three were all accomplished composers, they went to work and wrote an album worth of material inspired by the melodic approach and apparent harmonic simplicity of some of their models. With De Luxe, the Crooked Trio essentially wrote a new book of standards with themes ranging from depression to the simple joy of being together - and with the likes of Herbie Nichols and Duke Ellington watching over their shoulders.
Turns out that De Luxe is way more than an stylistic exercise or a tribute album. It’s a beautiful album by a powerful trio and its tunes could very well become the standards of tomorrow.