Jazz Albums Round-Up: Dino Saluzzi, John Taylor Trio

There's an honourable genre within jazz that you might call pipe-and-slippers music, if only it didn't sound so insulting. Sparse instrumentation, slow tempi and dreamy tunes combine to form relaxing soundscapes in which to immerse oneself. Add the defining clarity of a sympathetic recording method and a pleasing environment in which to appreciate it, and you get a product that is perhaps as close to interior design as it is to music.

The Argentine bandoneon-player Dino Saluzzi is a master of this kind of approach, whatever label he may be recording for, although his albums on ECM, for which he began working in 1982, are particularly successful.

Saluzzi's latest, Responsorium (ECM), in which he forms a trio with Palle Danielsson on double bass and his son José M Saluzzi on guitar, is an absolute triumph. The leader's subtle improvisations on nine of his own compositions are partnered by sensitive, impeccably modest contributions from bass and guitar, with the whole project following a marvellously airy, dancing aesthetic that is best exemplified by the daringly fleet-footed ensemble sections. When Saluzzi solos, in that soulful, melancholic style that represents his own form of tango nuevo, you can hear every wheeze and click of bellows and keys, as if the bandoneon is expressing sympathy by falling apart at the seams.

There's a similar quality of light, dancing improvisation at work in the John Taylor Trio's Rosslyn (ECM), which is more pipe-and-sneakers than pipe-and-slippers. The British pianist combines a ruminative, restlessly probing manner with lightning changes of mood and tempo, where a sense of swing is never far away, however cerebral things might sound. Incredibly, despite having recorded for ECM for 25 years, this is Taylor's debut as a leader on the label. With such a lot of time to choose his musicians, Taylor has chosen well, and New Yorkers Marc Johnson on bass and Joey Baron on drums – with whom he appeared as part of his 60th-birthday celebrations last year – provide complementary foils for Taylor's customary interplay of rhythm and rhapsody; Johnson was also a bassist to Taylor's hero, Bill Evans, while Baron has the enviable ability, as Charlie Haden once said of Paul Motian, to make the drums sound like a musical instrument. It's a great record.