Glauco Sagebin is a Brazilian jazz pianist, but he’s not a "Brazilian jazz" pianist, if you know what I mean - that’s to say while the wealth of music in Brazil has impacted Sagebin, it’s not a genre-type assessment of his style. He plays very melodiously in the vein of Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock - not just stylistically, but he’s absorbed the humanity of each pianist’s approach. Sagebin shows you both sides of the coin: there’s tenderness and ballet-dancer grace, but also wariness, pensiveness and logic. Like those giants - and like Thelonious Monk, though GS sounds nothing like him - he never blitzes the listener with a barrage of notes when a few judicious, well-placed ones will do nicely. GS and his trio prefer not to get in your face, but to back off just enough to get you to lean forward and pay attention. All this, and it swings, too. The respective bass and drums of Debriano & Braga are taste/tasty personified, but also in the manner of the great Evans trios, virtually equal participants in these 11 (yes!) three-way dialogues. The program consists of stripped-down (though not "deconstructed" - at least not overtly) renditions of Brazilian songs, like A.C. Jobim’s "Luiza," which, interestingly, is given a reading a bit more abstract than the brisk "Brazilian" take on the Gershwin brothers’ "Fascinating Rhythm." WBMT (GS's US debut, btw) isn’t first-thing-in-the-AM jazz (OK, so the Don Pullen-meets-Kenny Barron original "Rio Negro" is), but neither is it late-nite-book-reading-background jazz.... that would make this resistant to blithe "categorization," I guess, and as Martha used to say, that’s a good thing. Or, let me put it this way: if you’ve at all been moved by the recent spate of dandy piano-trio platters invading the marketplace - i.e., Uri Caine, Pete Malinverni, Bill Charlap, Marilyn Crispell, Kenny Werner - or dig the most righteous Mr. Evans, this is definitely worth the risk of your entertainment-fund dollars.