In composing for the three of us, my thinking was influenced most of all by the sound of the Ahmad Jamal Trio. It was a piano trio rather than a saxophone trio. But what I learned had to do with the way the music was arranged—the sense of space. They could lock into a groove, but they also knew how to be elliptical: to play a hint or a dollop in a way that suggested more.
You get the hand you’re dealt. And this was my hand. I was thrilled to have it, too: a dedicated group of three musicians, living in the same neighborhood and playing together all the time. What more could I want? But it required a particular approach compositionally speaking. I was working with a minimal palette. How much can you do with seemingly limited means? It meant learning how to write by implication. I didn’t have a brass section to work with, or an arsenal of violas to bring out some timbral nuance. As I said to a journalist once, it forced me to learn to write the silhouette of the thing rather than the thing itself.
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