Paul Motian has been playing at the Village Vanguard for half a century now, his earliest engagements of note in a legendary trio with pianist Bill Evans and bassist Scott LaFaro. Quietly revolutionary, that group broke with the age-old model of the piano trio as a vehicle for a leader with support, proposing instead a democratic interweaving of voices.
Motian has been challenging conventional notions of the jazz group and the drummer's role within it ever since, in the process forging a singular, idiosyncratic style. His rigorously conceived playing can seem ramshackle loose; defining time rather than being defined by it, he provides a continuous shifting of density rather than a lockstep pulse. As a composer and bandleader Motian combines the fluidity he developed alongside Evans with a chimerical puckishness more in tune with Thelonious Monk, which probably explains why Monk's music turns up regularly in Motian's sets.
Among the various bands Motian has assembled over the years, the most durable has been his trio with tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano and guitarist Bill Frisell, active since 1985. An especially protean group, the trio can be playfully boppish one minute and dreamily languorous the next. Thanks to its longevity and Motian's old-master status, the trio is among the rare groups that can command and fill regular two-week bookings at the Vanguard. The latest started on Tuesday (Aug. 24); the hitch is that this time, Lovano couldn't make it for the first week.
Instead, Motian and Frisell are playing with two of the brightest younger saxophonists in New York, Tony Malaby and Mark Turner. Both have the versatility and presence of mind to negotiate Motian's protean conception. Each brings an individual sound and style, offering fruitful contrast not just to Lovano but to one another.
You heard the differences immediately in "Circle Dance," the brash Motian tune that opened the first set on Thursday night (Aug. 26). Malaby gripped the theme firmly, pushing and pulling it where he wanted it to go. Turner snuck up on it, whispered in its ear, coaxed it to climb and curl. Motian splashed and splattered in emphatic counterpoint; Frisell knit it all together with a thread of steadily plucked notes.
Frisell had more to say in "This Nearly Was Mine" and said it with a homespun twang, Motian's brushes adding fine-grain abrasion rather than silky polish. Later in the set, the horn players each sparred with Motian one-on-one. Malaby quietly growled and fluttered, coloring with split tones and oozing into seams between the pitches; Turner, as quietly, raced through curling arabesques up to alto-range peaks. Elsewhere their unison playing could sound like the work of a single musician, playing lines that shifted and wobbled as if sounding through a heat haze.
Throughout most of the set Frisell stuck with the warm, woolly purr that's predominated most of his work over the last decade and more. Near the end, in "Last Call," he finally kicked a few of his pedals, igniting a nasty fuzz-tone squeal with looped accompaniment but maintaining a firm grip on the reins. (I know, mixed metaphor.) The effect was something like steam being forced through ornately curled glass tubes, blazing hot but entirely contained and focused.
Motian, Frisell, Malaby and Turner will be playing through Sunday night at the Vanguard, then Lovano arrives on Tuesday for the second week of the engagement. Next Thursday Malaby sets up shop a few blocks south and east next, playing for four nights with three different bands at the Cornelia Street Café; you can read more about that stint here.
Setlist:
Circle Dance
This Nearly Was Mine (Oscar Hammerstein II/Richard Rodgers)
Cosmology
Eronel (Thelonious Monk)
Sue Me (Jo Swerling/Abe Burrows/Frank Loesser)
Marrook
Last Call
Drum Music
(compositions by Paul Motian except as noted)
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