Honduran-born, New Orleans-based pianist Oscar Rossignoli brings several strands of his musical life into unusually convincing alignment with his latest release, “Mar Adentro.” Classical discipline, Latin rhythms, and modern jazz improvisation all coexist here without sounding like ingredients that have been consciously assembled.
This album marks an important change of format for Rossignoli. After the solitary exploration of “Inertia” and the completely improvised “Levitations,” Rossignoli surrounds himself here with bassist Lex Warshawsky and drummer Peter Varnado. One of his priorities was for the studio album to preserve the responsiveness and unpredictability of the trio in performance, and Mar Adentro plays out as a genuine three-way conversation rather than piano accompanied by rhythm section.
The opening “Gitanerías,” by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona, immediately establishes the record’s breadth. Rossignoli begins alone, taking on the piece’s demanding classical language before Warshawsky and Varnado enter and redirect the music toward contemporary jazz.
That transition leads naturally into the title track, the album’s emotional centre. The origins of “Mar Adentro” stretch back to a night Rossignoli spent working aboard a cruise ship. Unable to sleep, he encountered a grand piano at around three in the morning and began improvising. He recorded what emerged on his phone and later developed portions of that spontaneous performance into the composition.
That sense of memory continues through “Puñadito de Arena,” Rossignoli’s interpretation of Belisario Romero’s Honduran folk song. Its image of holding onto a handful of sand as a remembrance of something lost gives the album one of its strongest links to Rossignoli’s homeland.
The album becomes more rhythmically restless with “Ebbs and Flows,” a piece built around alternation between a gentle pulse and swinging passages. Then comes
“Serpent,” the album’s longest and most ambitious piece at over ten minutes. Conceived around a confrontation with evil, it gives the trio space to build something closer to a narrative tone poem. Warshawsky’s bass becomes particularly ominous as the composition twists through darker territory, but the piece eventually dissolves into an unexpected calm.
As an album, Mar Adentro feels like both a culmination and a departure point. Rossignoli is looking backward at Honduras and more than a decade immersed in New Orleans, while simultaneously moving toward a more personal conception of the jazz piano trio. The sea inside him is crowded with influences, memories and contradictions. The achievement of this album is that he finally allows them to move together.