The German trio PLOT – sax player Sebastian Wehle, double bass player Robert Lucaciu, and drummer Philipp Scholz, is not the typical classic saxophone trio. PLOT reinvents the sax trio format and even more reinvents itself on its sophomore album «Cadenza». PLOT’s debut album, «Tightrope» (WhyPlayJazz, 2015), featured muscular and upbeat, jazzed-up covers of popular songs, most of them of The Beatles. «Cadenza» experiments with minimalist, contemporary music, and offers twenty subtle and coherent miniatures, that follow each other with logical precision.
PLOT suggests now a lyrical and dark, chamber-music atmosphere. Sparse sketches, ideas, and sonic inventions are developed methodically in a balanced, sharp, and nuanced tone, but a tone that is spiced with the improvisational soulfulness and strong individual voices. This reductionist, minimalist approach leaves behind the traditional jazz idiom, especially the American one, and now focuses on brief and cerebral gestures that embrace silence as an essential element in PLOT’s language.
Obviously, this new incarnation of PLOT demands attentive and patient listening that goes against the instant gratification nowadays popular culture. But this kind of repeated, uncompromising listening may allow you to decode the multilayered, liquid structures and the implied, poetic interplay.
Eyal Hareuveni
Sebastian Wehle (s), Robert Lucaciu (b), Philipp Scholz (dr)
