Oz Noy: Triple Play

New album features Noy alongside bassist Jimmy Haslip and drummer Dennis Chambers, recorded live in concert.

For the tenth album to bear his name, guitarist, bandleader, and educator Oz Noy opted for the most demanding possible context: An absolutely unvarnished concert recording, capturing his trio with virtuosi Jimmy Haslip (bass) and Dennis Chambers (drums) without the benefit of overdubs or post-production sweetening. Triple Play, to be released on October 27, 2023 by Abstract Logix, was recorded over two evenings at Stages Music Arts – a performance space, recording studio, and educational facility in Maryland where both Noy and Chambers have conducted masterclasses. “We’d done a few tours,” Noy explains from New York City, his home base since relocating from his native Israel in 1996. “The band was sounding so good, I wanted to record it.” 

Fresh from a European trawl, the trio is documented in peak form – balancing muscular confidence with a tireless exploratory zeal. Master musicians with nothing to prove, Noy, Haslip, and Chambers are unafraid to let the music breathe, with even the most furious passages characterized by an airy spaciousness and an approach refreshingly free of frenetic posturing. As demonstrated on such compelling studio excursions as the recent Snapdragon (2020), Booga Looga Loo (2019), and the two-volume Twisted Blues (2011 and 2014), Noy’s ingenious knack for underpinning off-kilter harmonic ideas with sturdily righteous funk, R&B, and blues grooves provides endless possibilities for compelling melodic invention. On Triple Play, the road-hardened trio exhibit telepathic interplay equally marked by both search and swagger.

Eight Noy originals from past recording projects form the core of Triple Play, with Noy’s unique slant on blues and bebop emphasized via a haunting reharmonization of Thelonious Monk’s “Bemsha Swing” and an elongated exploration of “Billie’s Bounce,” a Charlie Parker blues theme. Noy’s delightfully angular, unexpected phrasing is enhanced by deftly (but never gratuitously) deployed effects, while Haslip’s bass is nimbly melodic one moment, gutbucket simple the next. For all his incredible technique, Chambers never shies away from the backbeat throughout Triple Play – giving the ensemble a taut, coiled intensity that dances in and out of explosive passages with thrillingly dynamic vigor.

Heard as it was delivered onstage in late December 2022, the music on Triple Play demands no further refinement – as a note in the album’s packaging reinforces: “What you hear is what we played, no overdubs or added instruments!” Adds Noy, “I wanted to capture the live sound of the band. As real as it gets.”