Trapezo Mantilo is a quartet of Italian jazzers who have taken as their mantle the shape and nomenclature of two very disparate sources: the chamber set up of Jimmy Giuffre and the harmonics of Ornette Coleman from his pre-harmolodic period (and some of those too). With a lineup that is half strings (guitar and cello), drums, and clarinet (with a smattering of tenor and flute), the atmospherics in Mantilo's music are pervasive. Tunes follow along tonal and motif lines and become, for all their airiness, meditations on sonic interplay rather than a showcase for one musician or another to solo or the group to engage in pyrotechnic harmonics. Indeed, subtlety is the name of the game. Tracks like the title, which commences as a pastoral exercise in jazz-funk, become open tapestries of cinematic soundscapes. "Loulou" slyly uses a Berg theme (from the opera of the same name) and creates seemingly endless harmonic variations on its bass clef. "3.33" is not an ape of John Cage's "4:33," but, in a sense, it is inspired by the same mischievousness. Offering an impressionistic melodic framework by Mauro Negri's clarinet, the tune quickly becomes a Gershwin-esque exercise in chromatic interplay before slipping into an accented arpeggio idiomatic of the blues. Nothing on Poirot is less than mysterious or compelling; everything on the album calls us to wonder about our own presuppositions regarding jazz and avant-garde music and why the genres exist in the first place. ~ Thom Jurek