| Jazz |
Oscar Rossignoli’s Mar Adentro: A Magnificent New Orleans Piano Trio Album Born Out at Sea
With his really great Mar Adentro, the Honduran-born, New Orleans-based pianist and composer Oscar Rossignoli shows us that an artist has arrived: a trio record that is brilliant, deeply felt and strikingly original. It is a great album and an easy choice for our PARIS-MOVE highest mark, “a must”!
New Orleans has one of the richest piano traditions in the world. It runs from Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Jelly Roll Morton through Professor Longhair, Fats Domino and James Booker to today’s Crescent City royalty. Rossignoli belongs in that company. The notes in the CD leaflet, written by T. R. Johnson of the local station WWOZ, argue that no one has made a piano record that better joins the energy of the deep past with the cutting edge of the present.
Rossignoli grew up in Honduras, where he studied with Amalia Marin and fell in love with Afro-Cuban music. His influences also include Chucho Valdés, Michel Camilo and Oscar Peterson. He later studied at Louisiana State University and earned a Master’s degree in Jazz Studies at the University of New Orleans, where he was named the 2015–2016 ASCAP Louis Armstrong Scholar. He was also a finalist in the 2018 Ellis Marsalis International Jazz Piano Competition. He quickly became one of the city’s busiest pianists, working with Herlin Riley, Jason Marsalis, John Boutté, Nicholas Payton, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Kurt Elling, as well as the Louisiana Symphony Orchestra. Tom McDermott has called him his favourite Nola pianist, adding that he is hardly alone in that view.
Rossignoli’s two previous solo albums, Inertia and Levitations, suggested a vast inner world, an inward sea. The big step on Mar Adentro is the trio. The song-like phrasing of bassist and producer Lex Warshawsky and the fiery, always surprising drumming of Peter Varnado give the pianist endless chances to start a conversation and take flight. Most of the repertoire is Rossignoli’s own, set beside pieces by Ernesto Lecuona, Belisario Romero and Billy Strayhorn. The result drifts freely between classical music, Latin rhythms, funk, standards and open improvisation without ever feeling like a mixture of styles.
The opening already holds the whole album in miniature. Rossignoli begins alone with the dense, marble-like blocks of Lecuona’s “Gitanerías”, then bass and drums arrive with a groove he can ride in any direction. The classical work becomes modern jazz while keeping its dazzling elegance. The title track, “Mar Adentro”, begins the opposite way, with a brooding, atmospheric search. It then settles into faintly blue melodic figures that recall Bill Evans, set over traces of what Jelly Roll Morton called the Spanish tinge, the habanera and tresillo rhythms that came to New Orleans from the Caribbean. The piece has a remarkable origin. Rossignoli was working on a cruise ship and could not sleep, so in the middle of the ocean and the middle of the night he sat down at a grand piano around 3 a.m. and began to improvise. A few hours later he had recorded an epic improvisation on his phone, full of wistful yearning and resolve, and he later transcribed parts of it to build the tune. In a sense it maps the road to the Atlantic-Caribbean sea within himself, and the name means literally “the sea inside”. It is hard to imagine a more fitting origin for the album’s centrepiece.
“Puñadito de Arena”, the Honduran folk song by Belisario Romero, is a small handful of beach sand kept as a souvenir of a love that has gone. Rossignoli plays it with great tenderness. The mood carries into Billy Strayhorn’s “Star-Crossed Lovers”, where the melody has the warmth of a beach at twilight and the notes fall like ice cubes into a glass.
“Shifting Contexts” is a kaleidoscopic showpiece that shows Peter Varnado’s feel for Latin percussion. Rossignoli starts in the upper register with a brief echo of the classical sound that began the record, then drops quickly to a funky bottom and a darker mood, driving headlong with Warshawsky’s bass. The idea of dance, of graceful flight from one form to another, grows steadily stronger. “Ebbs and Flows” has a gentle, pulsating groove that alternates with an irresistibly swinging section. Bass and drums sound like a single entity, and Rossignoli’s playing recalls the lyrical flow of Gonzalo Rubalcaba. The piece ends in a hush, and you will probably take a deep breath. The leaflet suggests that is the point: the tune invites you to follow the ebb and flow of your own breathing, and as the album itself ebbs out to sea, you start to flow into the spaces it has created.
“Serpent”, over ten minutes long and the longest piece on the album, takes the listener from meditation to a confrontation with evil. It begins with an ominous, tango-like menace. Warshawsky’s chilling bass solo uncoils like a snake hunting its prey, then the trio storms back before the music grows quieter and arrives at a transformative peace. The final phrases feel like a gentle exorcism. Rossignoli’s gifts as a composer and storyteller are clearest here.
Mar Adentro was recorded in New Orleans in the late spring of 2026 and will be released on CD, digital and vinyl. The vinyl is a clear vinyl audiophile pressing issued for Black Friday, with the seven main tracks (about 42 minutes). The CD adds two bonus tracks: a magnificent version of Ellis Marsalis’s “Swinging at the Haven”, and a quick, hard-swinging “espresso version” (take 1) of “Ebbs and Flows”. Collectors will want the vinyl, and fans who want everything will want the CD too.
Mar Adentro mixes technique, imagination, emotion and a strong sense of place. Rossignoli moves from the classical to the Latin to the deeply introspective with total naturalness, and his trio is with him at every step. The leaflet’s author calls it “a magnum opus”, and I totally agree. It is a perfect introduction to Rossignoli’s piano playing and compositions, and a must for lovers of jazz piano, Latin jazz and beautiful music. Highest mark: A must.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, October 30th, 2026
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Musicians:
Oscar Rossignoli – piano
Lex Warshawsky – bass
Peter Varnado – drums
Tracklist (CD & vinyl): 1. Gitanerías (Lecuona) 3:51 · 2. Mar Adentro 7:14 · 3. Puñadito de Arena (Romero) 5:19 · 4. Star-Crossed Lovers (Strayhorn) 3:58 · 5. Shifting Contexts 5:39 · 6. Ebbs and Flows (take 4) 5:55 · 7. Serpent 10:19
CD bonus tracks: 8. Swinging at the Haven (E. Marsalis) 4:43 · 9. Ebbs and Flows (take 1, espresso version) 6:11
Live: Album release celebration at Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro, New Orleans, 27 November 2026.