Samuel Blaser has been playing jazz innovator Jimmy Giuffre’s music all of his performing life, but the Swiss trombone virtuoso has only recently decided to make a specialty of it. And based on his Giuffre-dedicated Spring Rain CD, that was a good call: the record strikes a fine balance between Blaser’s outgoing personality and the more delicate shades Giuffre introduced to jazz during the early 1960s.

Classics like Fusion, Thesis, and Free Fall weren’t Blaser’s introduction to Giuffre, however. “In the big bands where I used to perform, we used to play ‘Four Brothers’,” says the Berlin-based musician, speaking in lightly accented English from New York City, where he’s exploring a number of different musical settings before embarking on the tour that will soon bring his own quartet to Vancouver.

He’s referring to the swing-to-bop hit Giuffre penned for Woody Herman’s band in 1947, and if that were the clarinetist’s only entry in the Big Book of Jazz Standards, his legacy would be assured. But it’s the music that Giuffre would go on to make, especially in conjunction with bassist Steve Swallow and the Canadian pianist Paul Bley, that really caught Blaser’s ear.

“I was really impressed by the writing, the delicateness of the music, the sensitivity,” the trombonist explains. “And I think I was happy to see that I could link this music to what I was doing—although that was a bit scary, because I realized that our music hasn’t really evolved from then.”

He’s being too modest. Although Spring Rain proves that Giuffre’s vintage compositions still sound entirely au courant, it’s not just an album of covers. Blaser wrote half of the record’s dozen tracks by himself, with the intent being to bring Giuffre’s novel ideas about space, timing, and interplay into the 21st century. He’s succeeded brilliantly, especially on “The First Snow”, which somehow combines a quizzical melody with noisy Moog and electric piano from keyboardist Russ Lossing.

Steve Swallow agrees. Tapped to pen the liner notes for Spring Rain, the sole survivor of Giuffre’s classic trio writes, “This CD presents a mature music, one which allows its players to be daring and bold, yet is also respectfully aware of what Jimmy Giuffre and a few other visionaries have bequeathed us.”

Blaser is deservedly flattered. “I would love to meet him in person one day,” he says. “Hopefully, that’s a possibility.”

With the trombonist rapidly expanding his American contacts—and his Canadian ones: he’s already recorded with Vancouver clarinetist and fellow Giuffre aficionado François Houle—there’s no reason why that shouldn’t happen. But first Blaser has to finish the follow-up to Spring Rain, which, he reveals, will focus on another of his primary influences: the blues. And while a plan to have saxophonist Ravi Coltrane appear on the earlier record didn’t pan out, he’s already contacted a couple of stateside veterans for his next.

“I’m trying to have guests that are not too related to what I am doing, so as to have more of a clash of genres,” he says with a chuckle. “So Wallace Roney will be on trumpet and Oliver Lake on saxophone. This will create a nice horn section—and one that is not typical, as well.

“Maybe it will fail,” he adds. “I don’t know, but I’ll give it a try.”

The Samuel Blaser Quartet plays the Western Front next Friday (October 14).