Rruga ECM ****

With the most cursory listen to Rruga, – Albanian for "trip" – it's clear that the ECM debut of talented young Swiss pianist Colin Vallon's trio, with Patrice Moret (bass) and Samuel Rohrer (drums), has the collective at the heart of its modus operandi. Terse and focused, each performance is an intense, measured musical conversation, a nuanced, rhythmically fluid mix of colour and texture woven around deceptively simple, songlike lines. In it the soloist is not so much undermined as subsumed into the group sound much more than in any other current piano trio. It's also an impressionistic approach that achieves dramatic resolution,

at its best in the varied moods of such pieces as Telepathy, Rruga, Home, Polygoniaand Eyjafjallajökull, brief evocations full of an austere and stately beauty that illustrate the range of an accomplished, individual trio. See classical.ie