Calling a piano trio album Flip the Script in 2012 might seem like too much irony to bear, but Orrin Evans and his hard-swinging rhythm section (bassist Ben Wolfe, drummer Donald Edwards) invigorate one of jazz’s most commonly deployed — not to mention beaten-into-the-ground — formats. This is Evans’s fifth album for Posi-Tone in two years, including a live big-band disc and one by the adventurous trio-plus-guests (Oliver Lake, JD Allen, Nicholas Payton) Tarbaby. On Flip the Script, the program includes eight originals, a run through “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and a melancholy, disc-closing solo version of “The Sound of Philadelphia,” aka the Soul Traintheme, a fitting tribute to his hometown and the late Don Cornelius. Stylistic shifts abound — “Question” and “Big Small” have a Monkish lurch; “TC’s Blues” lopes along in a summery, toe-tapping manner; “When” is a furrowed-brow ballad — but ultimately, it all becomes a seamless whole.
