- Dave Kikoski : Giant Steps ( J. Coltrane )

-On his self-titled album on Epicure - the new Epic Records imprint created to showcase young jazz players and composers in the post-bop mode - this pianist and composer has realized that delicate balance of tradition and innovation with the help of veteran drummer Al Foster and bassist Essiet Essiet. After two independent label releases and some two dozen recording dates as a sideman - with trumpeter Randy Brecker and the late Red Rodney, drummers Roy Haynes and Billy Hart, saxophonists Craig Handy and Ralph Moore - Dave Kikoski now steps forward as a leader to demonstrate the impressive development of his own music.

The album's opening track, "E", could well stand for "experimental": it's a veritable textbook of the unconventional harmonic devices - the unusual intervals, counterpoint, and triads over bass notes - on which Kikoski bases his tunes. The "E" of the title is actually the key used as a pedal point in this bright, fast-moving piece, with Kikoski and drummer Foster trading shout choruses on the bridge. "Chant" by contrast, harmonizes in parallel fifths - a convention of Gregorian chants which gives Kikoski's piece its distinctively somber atmosphere.

But Dave Kikoski's compositions are not simply pianistic experiments out on the fingers of jazz. "E" swings right along like any good tune from a blowing session, and on "Giant Steps" the pianist finds avenues to his harmonic concept while adhering to the symmetry of John Coltrane's fleet-footed chord progressions. Another Kikoski original, "B Flat Tune", draws on styles as diverse as Brazilian samba and English progressive rock.

Born in Milltown, New Jersey, Dave Kikoski's first music lessons came from his father, a part-time musician who sat his son at the piano and taught him songs by Count Basie and Duke Ellington as well as the basics of Chopin and Beethoven. "If you start like that, when you're seven or eight, you know what jazz is, it's in you," says Dave. "It's not like I went to Berkley and learned to play jazz." He did attend Boston's Berkley School of Music after graduating from New Brunswick High School, however, where he played in the school jazz band as well as with rock bands whose repertoire ranged from Emerson, Lake -