Down home with the Michael Kaeshammer piano trio in Vancouver

Indianapolis jazz fans who may remember long-ago visits by Astral Project  to the Jazz Kitchen know the

Kaeshammer's rootsy piano is well-known in Canada.

kind of groove to expect from drummer Johnny Vidacovich and his irrepressibly bouncy chat with the audience. A little bit of the talk and a lot of the groove help create the relaxed atmosphere of "The Warehouse Sessions," a new recording (Linus Entertainment) under the direction of Michael Kaeshammer, an eminent member of the Canadian jazz community.

Kaeshammer's boogie-woogie-informed style at the piano leads the way in perfect rapport with Vidacovich and the steady pulse of bassist David Piltch through nine tunes. They are all likely to make instant connections with listeners who may want a respite from complexity in the enduring trio format of piano-bass-drums.

They get down to hard-digging relatability with "You Got It in Your Soulness," a piece from Les McCann's 1969 hit album "Swiss Movement." Kaeshammer's decorative elements are well placed. Anything fancy in his playing avoids knottiness: there's a chorus with trills in the right hand, octaves in the left. It's all that's needed when it comes to thickening the texture. 

The trio supposedly decided the set list on the fly, moving from one piece to the next and settling for first takes in a Vancouver warehouse/recording studio. The recording's title oddly uses the plural, but this seems to be one session, not more. The tradition is always at hand, so it's on to Leroy Carr's "How Long Blues," then "Down by the Riverside." Vidacovich's "second-line" drumming, with its march-tempo snare-drum emphasis, is essential to the idiom.

But the real treasure of the recording is the trio's journey through "Caravan," a classic from the Duke Ellington catalogue and usually heard from a larger ensemble. It's a sign of the compatibility  of this band that what must have been a spontaneous arrangement seems so well planned. The drums are alone at the start, and at length Vidacovich shows how much variety his style can embrace. The piano takes off after stating the melody in the tenor range unelaborated. Eventually, the right hand turns flamboyant, but never noisy. In a tasty bass solo against snares and cymbals and a few piano chords,  Piltch's colleagues never crowd him. The ending is modestly laid out, as if this subtle caravan is simply fading across the desert sands. 

Kaeshammer is witty in "Bourbon Street Parade," a performance led off (presumably) by Vidacovich's direction "Chop, chop — I got the top." This is clearly not a group focused on originals, but thoroughly at home in what has gone before them. Ornette Coleman's early "Ramblin'" proceeds almost more blithely than the original, a classic that has always indicated how rudimentary the Fort Worth saxophonist considered his music to be.

The dominant piano in Horace Silver's "The Preacher" ends "The Warehouse Sessions" where it should, with Kaeshammer folding his down-home virtuosity into what seems to be a naturally laid-back quality. This record is all the more rewarding for not being ambitious, just a kind of comfort food that's free of excessive processing.