John Escreet

Exception to the Rule (Criss Cross 134)

Sabotage and Celebration (Whirlwind Recordings 4834)

HE IS a Doncaster boy, born in 1984, and a jazz piano rover too, from his early migrations to Manchester (Chetham’s School of Music) and London (Royal Academy of Music), from where his fascination with jazz and early inspirations like Keith Jarrett and Andrew Hill took him to New York in 2006 and the Manhattan School of Music.

Even by that time he admits that “I hadn’t sorted things out in terms of finding my own voice; I was putting on different stylistic hats at any given gig, but I realised that the greatest players don’t do that.”

But he knew for sure that jazz was his music and a full embrace of “the freedom to play whatever you want to create, something of your own.” These are ideals which he demonstrated with aplomb at a solo performance at the 2011 London Jazz Festival.

By 2011 too, he had cut his fourth album as a leader on the Dutch Criss Cross label and challengingly called it Exception to the Rule, with three other musical mavericks.

Altoist and electronic experimenter David Binney was born in Miami in 1961, grew up in a jazz-loving family in southern California and made the continental crossing to New York in 1990.

For two decades he has played at the highest level and in 2010 he recorded his own Criss Cross album, Aliso, with Escreet on piano.

The drummer is New Yorker Nasheet Waits, son of master percussionist Freddie and ex-member of Max Roach’s drum ensemble, M’boom, as well as ex-confrere of eminences such as Andrew Hill, William Parker and Jason Moran.

On bass is the Norwegian Eivind Opsik, another New York arrivant, since 1998.

Waits’s pounding solo drums begin the title track with Binney’s vaulting alto levitating over Opsvik’s blood count bass and Escreet’s comping keys.

It is but the first of the pianist’s 10 album compositions and it all seems a long, long way from South Yorkshire.

Escreet’s own scurrying solo is full of rapid and startling movement and creates a stark contrast with the ghostliness of the next track, Redeye, where Escreet’s mysterious chordings mix in a sonic cloud with Binney’s spectral electronics.

Collapse has a sound full of unease and perturbation, urged by Binney’s whining horn, while Opsvik’s stealthy bass line gives disturbing undercurrents to They Can See.

Escape Hatch has a part gyrating, part corner-turning Monkish theme, with Escreet’s solo full of upsetting motion and Binney’s whirling notes and electronic effects creating a fiery amalgam. After this, Waits’s exploring drums and Opsvik’s bowed bass on the hornless Wide Open Spaces seem intent upon release.

Binney’s alto builds up pace and virtually talks its indignant way through The Water is Tasting Worse, while Escreet launches himself along his keys in full agreement — sparking the summation of a powerful album, but one with naught for your comfort.

Escreet’s follow-up album, Sabotage and Celebration — released on the London-based Whirlwind label — was recorded the day after the US presidential election in November 2012 and directly reflects the “voter sabotage” launched against Barack Obama’s candidacy, including restrictive voter ID, the long, destabilising queues at polling stations which hampered many Obama supporters from voting and the suspicious “malfunctions” in electronic voting machines.

All these events are expressed in the album’s long title track.

Much of the other album material was written in the wake of the Atlantic coast’s devastating hurricane Sandy, which trapped Escreet in his New York apartment for the week before the recording.

The album is assertively ambitious and includes a string quintet, a brass duo, two vocalists, Escreet playing piano, Fender Rhodes on harpsichord, plus the exalted company of saxophonists Binney and Chris Potter, Matt Brewer on bass and drummer Jim Black.

Potter is powerfully prominent on He Who Dares and Escreet follows him with an assured virtuosity.

The “sabotage” on the title track is rendered by the musicians playing with a free portraiture of spoliation and chaos, yet its eventual climax provokes a transformation to a spirit of dance and celebration, set off and hinged by Escreet’s long, thematic solo.

Sabotage and Celebration is a very expressive Mingus-like album about real and reactionary events in Escreet’s adopted country, his jazz audacity matched by his focus on the real world around him, in the way of the finest of jazz musicians.

Watch out where this singular music takes him next.