Sweet or Hardcore, Nothing is Quite What it Seems

WIDE EYED

The pianist Danny Fox’s impressive second album, “Wide Eyed” (Hot Cup), sounds contemporary enough. There’s a link between his deliberate, repetitive, sometimes consciously jarring or decorous phrases and the pianist Ethan Iverson’s, and a link between the cooperative strategies in the Danny Fox Trio and in the trio Mr. Iverson plays with, the Bad Plus. But Mr. Fox’s sound — his group’s sound — is complete within itself and not in a hurry; it’s cool but not modish. It feels developed apart from the current scene in clubs and music schools, looking outside and backward, as in the slow, curious “Wide Eyed” and the short solo-piano “Patriot Daze,” which present a new version of a ruminative, imposing, orderly chamber-jazz tradition that goes back to Duke Ellington. These are prepared and worked-out pieces, episodic and detailed; these band members know one another’s moves, but the songs don’t rely on improvised sound and interplay to get over.