CD CHOICE:PABLO HELD, MusicPirouet, ****

Anyone who heard Pablo Held at the 12 Points jazz festival in Stavanger, Norway last month (the event’s first trip abroad from its Dublin base) could have little doubt but that they were hearing a singularly gifted pianist. With his working trio – Robert Landfermann (bass) and Jonas Burgwinkel (drums) – Held’s unbroken, hour-long set was one of the festival’s highlights.

The trio’s second CD for the Pirouet label, recorded last November, shows why. There is the close-knit feel of a working band that has been together since 2005, when Held was 17, in which ideas and motifs are unhesitatingly picked up and examined within a crucible of trust and mutual inspiration. Most of all, there is Held, who wrote eight of the 10 pieces here and whose musical personality is the dominant creative force in their exchanges.

Harmonically, it’s possible that John Taylor, with whom Held studied, has had an influence on him; it’s likely, too, that Olivier Messaien (whose sublime O Sacrum Convivium, a choral motet to a text by St Thomas Aquinas, is given a ballad reading here) had an impact harmonically.

But if imitators borrow, the truly creative steal for their own ends, and Held belongs among the latter. He also knows how to develop a

linear solo and shape it dramatically, as the opening Encore shows.

Even on a faster piece such as Herbie Hancock's I Have A Dream, there is an unhurried grace to his playing; with his partners pushing hard, it sets up a creative tension amid the vivid trio dialogue.

And on Desire, prefaced with a lovely, long solo piano intro, and on Moon 44 and Nearness, both set up with questing chords, the sense of Held savouring the implications of the material is almost palpable as he somehow blends surprise and logic.

If the Messaien is the least satisfying performance here – it’s like a pen and ink sketch compared with the lucid, full colour purity of the original – it’s more important overall that Held has the unmistakeable aura of a distinctive sensibility on its way to maturity.

At 23, he has time on his side, but right now he’s one of the most satisfying pianists around, and thriving in the context of this supple, inventive and flexible trio.

See pirouetrecords.com