" data-original-title="" title="">Jimmy Giuffre's late-1950s trio recordings. To be sure, like those records, this album is marked by intimacy and introspection, a strong clarinet sound and no drummer. But Silences, recorded at a French abbey, doesn't sound much like Giuffre's records—nor indeed, like much of jazz, at first blush.

It's not at first clear just what this piano-clarinet-bass formation is up to. The helpfully titled "Birth of a Trio" provides clues. It shows just how much this music shares with jazz—improvisation, first of all; and empathy, the musicians listening closely to each other, as for example when de Chassy's piano sidles up to Thomas Savy's soaring clarinet. "Trio" also demonstrates what's classical about the record: its language and grammar. Savy's clarinet is pure Mozart, clean and free of vibrato or the blues.

Most tracks here adapt classical compositions. The record begins, for example, with an aggressive and mechanical sounding piano-bass pulse in the opening of "Du c?t�� de chez Poulenc (Part I)," in striking contrast to the lovely Poulenc melody "Les chemins de l'amour," played by Savy. In a second take (Part II), the melody is played sensitively by each of the trio members in turn, with arco bass by Arnault Cuisiner and bass clarinet by Savy.

The inclusion of two Shostakovich piano preludes, meanwhile, might recall pianist