Jazz pianist and educator Kait Dunton has made a couple of fine albums while pursuing advanced music degrees and now that the schooling is done, the music career is going full steam ahead. All I’ve gotta say about that is: stand back, folks.
With drummer Jake Reed and bassist Cooper Appelt, Dunton has formed a working combo christened trioKAIT. Though this is basically an acoustic trio (aside from some electric bass from Appelt), the leader and composer with her rhythm section are creating a lot of modern sounds with this getup.
A new album is on the way in early 2015, and it’s readily apparent from the sampler stream above that this group is incorporating a lot of contemporary elements like RnB, fusion and even EDM into the mix, while remaining steadfastly jazz. But it’s jazz for the here and now, sounding fresh and accessible in spite of all the nifty little complexities they instill into the music. That’s Kait Dunton’s hallmark.
So yes, trioKAIT is new, but in a way, Dunton is going back to the driving, dynamic style of her exciting debut album Real And Imagined, still one of my favorite piano trio albums of the last six or seven years.
If you’re in the L.A. area tonight, why don’t you catch trioKAIT perform at Squashed Grapes in Ventura.
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