John Taylor, Marc Johnson, Joey Baron

Rosslyn is a piano trio record by the British pianist John Taylor with two New Yorkers, bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joey Baron. Taylor had recorded for ECM for a quarter of a century, with Azimuth and as a sideman, yet this 2003 release was his first album as leader on the label. The programme joins four Taylor originals to pieces by old friends Kenny Wheeler and Ralph Towner, plus Irving Berlin's How Deep Is the Ocean.

The trio was already a working band. In January 2002 it played at the CBSO Centre in Birmingham on a Contemporary Music Network tour, a concert ECM issued in 2025 as Tramonto. A few months later, in April 2002, the three recorded Rosslyn at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Manfred Eicher producing and Jan Erik Kongshaug engineering. Johnson had been bassist to Taylor's hero, Bill Evans, a link Phil Johnson underlined in The Independent. He also credited Baron with the ability to make the drums sound like a musical instrument, borrowing what Charlie Haden once said of Paul Motian.

Taylor combines "a ruminative, restlessly probing manner with lightning changes of mood and tempo", in Phil Johnson's words, and the trio follows every turn. Between Moons, also heard on the Birmingham concert, opens without a fixed shape and gathers around Baron's tom rolls. How Deep Is the Ocean is loosened by chromatic harmony until the standard surfaces only in fragments. The title track rests on a short, insistent figure that the German magazine Jazzthetik heard as forcefully intoned minimalism. Wheeler's Ma Bel and Towner's Tramonto are taken slowly, and Baron often implies the pulse rather than stating it.

Reviews were warm in Britain and Germany. In Jazzwise Kenny Mathieson called it "lyrical, intelligent and hugely resourceful music-making, with pristine recorded sound to match", and noted that Taylor's inspiration lies deep in the central jazz tradition. Phil Johnson ended his review in The Independent plainly: "It's a great record." Rosslyn remained Taylor's only ECM album as leader in his lifetime; he died in 2015, and the Birmingham concert was released ten years later.

This edition is the CD, ECM 1751, first released on 27 January 2003.