Papasoff Trio Painless
(Nisapa)
Reviewed by Dean Cottrill

Listening to this CD one feels the swelling of an urban toughness associated with watching such film noire classics as Lost Weekend. Accordingly, one should listen to this music in black and white, allowing the subtler textures to expose the greys of your urban psyche, for within the beauty of the reeds (Charles Papasoff), bass (George Mitchell) and drums (Martin Auguste) are many alleys leading you away from the Main, cajoling you to enter at some forbidden doorway of opiate recklessness.

For there is a seedy edginess captured in these nine original soundscapes reminiscent of not-too-clean, not-too-safe inner city ruelles, qualities that give rise to a sense of hunger and scavenging for a living. Of course, that’s what makes the music all the more real.

Opening with a Latin-based Point of View, the intensity builds through a hard bop Netito to a hard funk chase scene in You Only Love Me 10 Days A Year. The urgency of the other tunes is balanced by the two Papasoff ballads, L’Inevitable and the title track (twins separated at birth?), and while continuity is provided throughout by virtue of crisp linear textures, it is in these ballads that this sparsity is most striking. The piano is so enticingly absent as to warrant crediting. But that’s the point- the trio creates enough interest through its own means. And with the additional seasonings of a Kelsley Grant trombone on Ten Days and Wishing For A Dry Heat or the acoustic and electric guitars of Christine Tassan and Alain Bellaïche, respectively on La vraie couleur, Painless has an inescapable allure.

The closing number, Wishing For A Dry Heat, leads the listener back to the relative stability of the familiar, recalling the inventiveness of Miles and Coltrane of the 50s and 60s. But having once taken that first, fateful step into this shadowy realm, you may have no choice but to return . . . again . . . and again . . . and again!

Dean Cottrill is a Montreal-based guitarist, songwriter and singer.

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