The pianist-composer John Escreet found himself in a room with just a piano for company during lockdown. Without any worldly distractions though, it provided the impetus for the 37-year-old Doncaster-born pianist-composer to get going on his first album in the acoustic piano trio format, having largely favoured both unplugged hybrids and an extended instrumental palette over his previous nine albums as leader – he went the whole hog, integrating strings on 2013's Sabotage and Celebration. Escreet's move to LA from New York, where he’d lived since moving from London in 2006, seemed to be a case of bad timing as it was just months before Covid struck. But Escreet, on the west as on the east coast, continues to engage with some of the hippest and highest quality contemporary-jazz musicians. Here the exploratory pianist is joined by the Branford Marsalis-aligned bassist Eric Revis and the innovative drummer Damion Reid, who's worked with other pianists Robert Glasper and more recently Tigran Hamasayan.

Escreet has a strikingly unique approach to jazz that's largely both highly percussive, dense harmonically and full of tension, and Seismic Shift is no exception; yet there's an eerie quality in his ambiguously-voiced spread chords compared to his more aggressively accented, sonic splashes and dense, spiky phrasing. Escreet's more soulful, free bop allegiances are here too, elements that were a highlight of 2018's excellent Learn to Live.

With his obvious technical prowess, Escreet makes the most of the entire sonic range of the grand piano. Although there are similarities with Cecil Taylor's stormy percussive style, Escreet is also drawn to more elusive composer-pianists such as Andrew Hill and Stanley Cowell. He assertively sets about Cowell's sublime ‘Equipoise’ theme (the only non-original) and it's emphatically delivered as you’d expect from Escreet. The pianist's original ‘Perpetual Love’ sounds like a sister piece to ‘Equipoise’ and has a compelling solo by Revis. It's challenging stuff, but Seismic Shift certainly deserves repeated listening.