Mike Nock

New Zealand-born pianist Mike Nock made significant creative contributions to new jazz with the electric group the Fourth Way at the end of the 1960s. Ondas, his sole ECM date, recorded in 1981, finds him leading an acoustic piano trio with an adroit bassist and a free-thinking drummer. Nock’s very open compositions leave plenty of space for each of them to shine. Eddie Gomez’s elastic bass is often a second lead voice in these pieces, and Jon Christensen’s pulses are felt as a succession of waves.