The President and Papa Joe

It is often said that Coleman Hawkins “invented” the tenor saxophone, but it's safe to say Lester Young—who would have turned 100 years old on August 27—was just as crucial to the development of the instrument, and just as integral to the various schools and approaches that would follow in the wake of early jazz. Young’s tone was entirely personal, lighter than the gruff, blustery tone of Hawkins, Ben Webster, and most of his contemporaries. His lines were fleeter because of it, and he seemed less beholden to the changes, though he was criticized for not having a “big” sound like most other tenormen. Players who followed his approach were those with a penchant for melodic improvisation, an approach that seemed more and more a renunciation, an against-the-received-wisdom bet, in the world of bebop, post-bop, and free jazz. Stan Getz is the apotheosis of this; here the student became just as strong a player as his mentor.

Great players can be identified by listeners after hearing only a few notes. Tone is more important than line here. Lester Young, known as "The President," or "Pres," had an instantly recognizable tone, as did Hawkins, Getz, Coltrane, Parker, McLean, Desmond, Lacy, Rollins, Bechet—anyone on the A-list. Tone is the hallmark of originality, and it’s the most important quality a saxophonist—or any musician—can possess. How fast you can move your fingers matters little if your tone is weak or undeveloped.

The saxophonist Joe Maneri could well be added to the above list—and in a jazz world less beholden to a carefully scripted “myth,” he’d certainly have a place in the pantheon. Known affectionately as The Round Man or Papa Joe, Maneri passed away this week. He came to some prominence—the word “some” is crucial—in the early 90s, when he was already in his late 60s. He’d been teaching at the New England Conservatory for decades, where he was deeply involved in microtonal music. His early approach was a mix of jazz and Eastern European ethnic musics, and he was already as advanced as Ornette Coleman at finding hidden layers in tone and tonality, creating lush phrases built on blurring the edges of the tempered scale. By the time of his 90s recordings for Hat, Leo, and ECM, he’d managed to pull together the disparate worlds of free jazz and microtonal music into something that can only be called visionary.

Extended technique—which is either terribly quiet or terribly loud these days—seems to be defining improvisation more and more, often to the detriment of the music. Maneri found his own extended technique but never lost sight of the horn as a musical instrument. His sound was powerful without the trappings of power, and emotional in a way very few in improvised music, whether they be boppers in bespoke suits or electronic musicians mired in the miniscule, manage to be. He didn’t need to fall back on art-school trappings or John Cage’s writings to find a genuine and organic modernity. Too many players are bound by doctrines; they need a manifesto to prop up their work. In other words, they talk too much. Maneri eschewed such banalities.

I was fortunate to see Maneri play many times, primarily at the Knitting Factory and Tonic. He was ably supported on violin and viola by his son Mat, who has carved a parallel path instead of simply following in his father’s footsteps. For the most part Maneri was wonderful live. But free improvisation is risky business, even for the best. There was an occasional show where it just didn't gel—music like this doesn't have a safety exit, you either make it or you don't—yet that was part of the beauty.

I don't think he'd ever have called himself a jazz musician, and yet his sound harkens back to Hodges and Webster. He wasn't afraid of tone or line, qualities seemingly lost these days in the effort to be “original.” He made his own music, but it's still tethered to a tradition. And that makes him a wonderful exemplar—like the great Lester Young.

Two Bookstores

Great cities are like great books that must be re-read to savor their full intensity; the more one spends time with them, the more they reveal their secrets. Both serve as pivots around which various cogs of our inner machinery grind. We end up seeing the cities and books we love as a reflection of ourselves, and ourselves as a reflection, however opaque, of some aspect of their streets or pages. These truths may well take a lifetime to unfold—thus the impulse to return to our favorites time and time again, to dive into the grid of well-worn pages and the maze of already-trodden streets.

It’s no surprise, then, that great bookstores are generally found in great cities; some serve a specific neighborhood (philosophy and literary criticism near a university, Black history in Harlem, film history in Hollywood, etc.) or reflect something unique about it, while at the same time transcending it. City Lights is such a place. It couldn’t be anywhere else—it’s the soul of North Beach—but it’s a world-class bookstore. When I lived in North Beach, it was a haven when I sought inspiration or a creative spark, which often came in the form of another Kerouac novel or volume of Beat poetry quickly taken to a coffee shop or bar to be read.

When I moved to Manhattan I sought out similar bookstores. The almost incessant movement here is tiring, and a good bookstore is a respite from the fracas, a way to find refuge from various purveyors—human and other—of loudness. One such store, Three Lives, is on a quiet corner in Greenwich Village, just off Seventh Avenue near Christopher Street. The façade is brick, the building unimposing, the front door creaky. New books are pressed against the windows from inside like beckoning faces. There is no hint of the disarray—or the dust—one finds in some small bookshops. New cloth titles line one front wall inside, new paperback titles another. There is a small section devoted to New York, and a back area, one small step up, where walls filled with fiction, poetry, and travel books surround a table where artfully designed paperbacks from boutique publishers lie face up, encouraging impulse buying. Seeing a book’s cover and not a spine does the trick sometimes. There is a small bench tucked into a corner. The cash register is in a slightly elevated nook that could be mistaken for a pulpit were it not for the green glow of a computer screen. You could cross the length of the shop in ten or twelve steps, but one is not likely to take that many in succession. The proprietors can’t prevent people from being rushed, but they do everything in their power to impede manifestations of pace. The effort largely succeeds.

Part of the reason I love Three Lives, and buy a good number of books there, has to do with a San Francisco bookstore—one that has been gone for about a decade now.

Tillman Place Books once occupied a small storefront on the street of the same name—an alley, really—off Grant Avenue just before its leap into Chinatown. The store was about the same size as Three Lives, but narrower and tighter. A cat roamed around when it wasn’t dozing in the window. Since space was a rare commodity, one had the sense that every title earned its shelf space by passing an entrance exam of which the parameters were both obvious and unstated. The rigors of such testing—in other words, the owner’s vision—can make or break an independent bookseller.

Regular customers could do something unheard of just about anywhere else: walk away with some books and be billed for them. And there would usually be more than one; a customer coming in for a specific title could easily leave with several others—which in the end is the whole point of shops like Tillman Place and Three Lives. They serve to spark a reader’s varying interests, to remind him that while Topic A is on the front burner, he’d always wanted to read more about Topic B—which leads in turn to Topic C. Plug in anything you want there: Fiction, history, biography, music, art.

In the fall of 1999 I received a card in the mail, accompanied by a photo of Tillman Place Books and a copy of an Elizabeth Bishop poem about loss. The note informed customers the store had closed. It came as no surprise; the owner had long felt he was losing ground to the Borders a few blocks away, and to people who came in to look but went home to their computers to buy. Which is why across the country, in a small bookstore in New York, I don’t just browse—I take my new finds to the cash register and pay for them on the spot.

The Wisdom of Beethoven

Last night I had an opportunity rare even in a city such as New York: I sat within twenty feet of one of the world's finest classical pianists and listened to him talk about one of the greatest composers of all time.

Andras Schiff has done something not many pianists are capable of: record all of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas, as well as play the complete cycle in about twenty concert halls around the world. At Steinway Hall he engaged in a dialogue with Swiss critic Martin Meyer, punctuating his comments with trips to the grand piano behind him so that he could offer examples.

A few highlights:

•While many children are able to play Mozart well, they should refrain from playing Beethoven, who requires years of study as well as the maturity and vision that only come with age.
•Haydn was one of the first to introduce humor into music; Beethoven followed suit, but in an entirely different manner.
•Many interpreters don't play enough attention to Beethoven's writings, much less his metronome markings. But though the sonatas can withstand some degree of variation in tempo, these can't be too wide of the mark.
•Mozart composed for the piano as it existed in his lifetime; Beethoven composed for the piano of the future.
•The "Moonlight Sonata" is not meant to have the romantic image commonly associated with it; the first movement is too often played in a manner that erroneously enhances this "soft" feeling. In fact, the tempo should be a little faster than is commonly heard, drawing out a darker side that dissipates when the crisp, unpedaled chords of the second movement make their appearance.
•Schiff said he would love to play cello. He was also glad that he wasn't a child prodigy, and he decried the world of piano competitions.

I left with a copy of Volume VIII of his sonata series on ECM. It contains the three last sonatas, pieces that really only great players can handle properly. I will hopefully talk more about the Opus 111 at some point; it's my favorite Beethoven sonata, indeed probably my favorite single piece of music. Pollini's version has long been my gold standard, and remains so. I like Schiff's approach, particularly in the second movement, which requires a deft touch to draw forth the crystalline lightness of the variations, in which Beethoven creates the illusion of an ever-increasing tempo by steadily decreasing the note values. But the first movement needs a little more muscle, a little more speed, than Schiff gives it. In Pollini's hands it firms up perfectly; unlike other Beethoven sonatas, I think the wiggle room here is narrow, and playing just a little too slowly makes the whole thing start to sag a bit. But it's a minor quibble, and comes after only one listen. Schiff's tone is lumious, his touch crisp and assured, and I have no doubt his version of Beethoven's adieu to the sonata will stay on my short list of greats.

Poetry with a beat

Jazz and poetry have long had a relationship, though sometimes it seems as if neither quite knows how to get in the trenches with the other, like two people looking at each other across a room who don’t know what to do when they finally meet. After the Beats, the jazz/poetry combo became a popular cliche, and everyone has probably seen a movie in which a hipster with a goatee and beret reads a free-form poem over the sound of a jazz group in the kind of bar or café your parents never set foot in.

The Beats had a strong and deep rapport with jazz, at least in an intuitive sense; Kerouac’s descriptions of jazz musicians in books such as “On the Road” and “Desolation Angels” are wonderful, and it’s clear he had a layman’s—and a poet’s—appreciation of the music and the men who made it. (At one point he was criticized for an impressionic article he wrote about jazz that was, perhaps, not entirely accurate; the publication held a contest for best pro and con letter received about the piece). He also set the standard for working with poets when he recorded an album of his haikus accompanied by the tenor saxophonists Zoot Sims and Al Cohn. The soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy set well over a hundred poems by writers such as Kerouac, Robert Creeley, and Brion Gysin to music, and others have tried, with varying amounts of success, to blend the forms.

So it was interesting to see two major poets, Robert Pinsky and Charles Simic, at the Jazz Standard this week, with a trio of top players—the vibraphonist Mike Manieri, the drummer Andrew Cyrille, and the bass player Lonnie Plaxico—behind them. What would transpire?

Both poets have strong voices and a sense of cadence, something many poets lack. Most poetry readings, in fact, are marred by poets who mutter, mumble, and rush their lines, reading their work as if it were a 30-second pitch on a night of speed dating. It’s usually a blur, and a bore—and it’s why I prefer poetry on the page, not the stage.

The evening at the Standard didn’t start out auspiciously. Pinsky introduced Simic and spoke briefly about how much they both loved jazz. He then read three poems, and Simic followed with three. Then the trio played a Monk tune, “Well You Needn’t.” It was all good, I guess, but I’d hoped for some kind of integration, not just a shift rotation every five or ten minutes. After a second tune, Pinksy came back and read a poem that mentioned Monk, and I began to sense that he and Simic were at least trying to weave a thread through the evening. Later, they both read with the trio playing behind them. It was getting interesting.

Occasionally lines from their poems stood out, as when Pinsky referred to the saxophone as a “twisted brazen clarinet,” or when Simic spoke of the “delicious melancholy” of Monk. Both have a sort of frumpy theatricality. Pinsky is more flamboyant, like an inspired professor; Simic comes off as reserved, but slyly and wryly lights up when his poems veer into the profane. The musicians, thankfully, seemed to be doing their best to remain engaged. A call and response, in which Pinsky read couplets from various poets and Cyrille responded with short drum solos, was probably the closest thing to real interaction between the words and the music. In the end, the couple looking at each other across the room at least made it through a dance before they separated at the end of the night. Let’s hope they meet again.

Smoke and glass on the Bowery

With downtown Manhattan morphing into what looks like a suburb of Houston or Los Angeles—it’s hard to tell in which city the boxy condos and hotels sprouting up would best fit—there seems to be little, well, grit left. This is especially true on the Bowery, which is essentially turning into a Fifth Avenue for well-minted arrivistes; a new art museum recently joined the glassy condos and boutiques that are effacing the very soul of the street. But one holdout, the Bowery Poetry Café, still hums with the right stuff.

I recently went to hear a band called Search there. I know the trumpet player, R.J. Avallone, from a music store in midtown where he works. He is the odd man out there—like a Brooklyn dweller stuck in Queens—because the shop is primarily devoted to saxophones. Like many who study in Boston, Avallone has come to New York to find his niche, because it ain’t in Beantown. There's a sameness to much of the jazz experience these days, but on this particular night a whiff of marijuana in the air in the Bowery Poetry Café and a band taking its cue from Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet made it seem like possibilities still exist.

Coleman’s music is infused with blues while resisting the easy or obvious aspects of the blues—not to mention bop, with which he has long had a dialogue across a smoky room. His tunes stop, start, weave, and bend; sometimes it seems as if Ligetti or Ives had peeked around the corner and tossed in a word of advice. The rhythm section is invited—compelled, in fact—to change grooves, and the horns can improvise from points all across the spectrum. Search's tunes shared these qualities, and as a result they kept my attention for the whole set. I can’t name the tenor player—I didn’t catch it at the gig and it isn’t listed on the band’s website—but he had the blustery, edgy tone of Dewey Redman, and seemed intent on making it felt. In an age of technique-obsessed players with brittle tone—who tend to play avalanches, not ideas—it’s refreshing to hear somebody focused on sound, and the line. As for Avallone, he mixed things up, moving from boppish lines to the smears—skid marks, as one old teacher of mine used to call them—that were the hallmark of Don Cherry’s style. A strong band that will get stronger over time.

The crowd was small, but in New York today that's all you can ask, and in the end it's probably what made the evening so cool. I doubt any of the folks in the nearby condos came, but that’s their loss. And anyway, they're not interested in finding anything that Search is looking for.

Hearings: ROVA's Electric Ascension

Of the musicians who dominated jazz in the 20th century, perhaps none left a greater wake than John Coltrane. Every phase of his career—post-bop, modal, and the roiled currents of free—continues to resonate. While it is possible to avoid sounding like Coltrane, it is difficult to skirt around the parameters his music imposed on the framework of modern jazz, or to hew a path in improvised music that does not in some way acknowledge one or more of his many innovations.

Coltrane’s biggest influence may well be the brilliant harmonic advances he made on albums such as Giant Steps, released in 1960. On that record and others, he superimposed complex chord changes on standards and even bop tunes, many of which were already re-harmonizations of standards. With his superb technique—honed to a fine edge by the late ‘50s—Coltrane was able to play tunes such as Giant Steps and Countdown at extremely fast tempi. The melodies of these tunes are closely tied to the chord progressions. There is no room—and at this speed, no time—to stray while improvising, since the harmonies are rigidly mapped out. Coltrane uses a limited set of simple patterns to weave his way through the changes with incredible deftness. The result, much like a Chopin or Liszt étude, is music that can sound more studied than soulful, though Coltrane’s blistering tone, always rooted in the blues, infuses the music with warmth.

Coltrane continued to use harmonic structures and permutations in his solos, though they became more oblique as his music became more based on modes upon which he could improvise for extended periods of time. Only at the very end of his life did this harmonic approach, stretched to its limits, shatter and succomb to the force of other ideas. One album from this time frame—Ascension—stands out as perhaps the most radical schism from earlier orthodoxies.

This beautiful and startling recording is an inauguration of a freer, breach-the-barriers sound (mostly on the tenor; his soprano playing always sounded much as it did on My Favorite Things, his first recording on the instrument, and though he is pictured holding a soprano on the cover of Ascension, he does not play it on the album), as well as a template for group improvisation that would be the seed for much of what followed—both in America and Europe—for years to come. Yet unlike many of his compositions, Ascension never became part of the jazz canon, and remained unplayed by other musicians.

That changed in 1995, when the Rova saxophone quartet—augmented by a rhythmn section and more horns in order to replicate Coltrane’s original lineup—performed and recorded a live version of Ascension in San Francisco to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its release.

Rova’s raucous and ebulent performance proved that Ascension, like A Love Supreme—not to mention dozens of Coltrane tunes—was a major work of art that could bear the burden of interpretation by other musicians. “The sonic universe that John Coltrane helped to reveal has become the terra firma of the present-day jazz renegade: a world of fantastic dimensions that still delights and challenges both practitioners and listeners alike,” said Rova saxophonist Bruce Ackley in the liner notes to the recording. “The piece stands as a model of collective improvisation that has resonated through the past three decades, providing a blueprint for late 20th century aural architects. Because of its scale, form, and intensity, Ascension may be Coltrane’s most profound work.”

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Ascension begins with an elegiac three-note statement, part of a B-flat minor pentatonic or blues scale. The horns play together, but come in at a different times, as if playing a round. The wild, almost cacophonous counterpoint that ensues is potent, and the fact that it is spontaneous only adds to its power.

The opening motif is simple, but serves as an incendiary device for the conflagration to come. The burning starts quickly; Coltrane, the first to solo, launches into a fiery improvisation right out of the gate, raising the energy level for the rest of the players. Coltrane’s biographer Lewis Porter calls his solo “miraculous.” It is the most well-conceived on the record, which is no surprise, even though Coltrane was just gaining a foothold on this radically different way of playing. If there is a hint of tentativeness, it is perhaps because he is shaking off the skein of his earlier work--something he would continue to do for the rest of his life. But the sense of exploration brought to the fore here—like his rewiring of the circuit board of bebop in the ‘50s—is powerful not the least because of the possibilities it foreshadows. The miracle is the parting of the waters.

During the statement of the theme and in many of the solos, the drumer Elvin Jones maintains a pulse but doesn’t generally keep strict time. His playing is fluid, like water supporting wood—there is push and pull, give and take. Other times, such as during the pianist McCoy Tyner’s solo, the groove hints at vintage Coltrane. Still, Tyner seems uncomfortable (he left Coltrane’s group shortly after Ascension was recorded), as if he can’t quite figure out what to do with himself. The horns, however—Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders on tenor; Marion Brown and John Tchicai on alto; and Freddy Hubbard and Dewey Brown on trumpet—show no such reticence. They seem to relish the opportunity to dive in. Sanders and Shepp play in the extreme ranges, using growls, multiphonics, screaming, and other effects (Sanders’ solo is a case study on the sonic possibilities of the saxophone). The effect is not unlike the speaking in tongues one might hear at a fundamentalist revival.

No indication apparently survives in Coltrane’s own writing regarding the harmonic changes, or the means by which they are cued during the group playing. Coltrane’s biographer, Lewis Porter, puts forth one set of possibilities; another can be found in the guitarist John Schott's essay on Coltrane in "Arcanum: Musicians on Music."

Rova’s live 1995 version, while similar to Coltrane’s, is nonetheless compelling enough to stand alone as an original interpretation. I was at the performance, and the sheer force and heft of it all was amazing. But an even more remarkable version was yet to come—one that brought Ascension into the 21st century.

❦

The Rova saxophone quartet (the name is an acronym of the last names of the founding members: the baritone saxophonist Jon Raskin; the tenor saxophonist Larry Ochs; the alto saxophonist Jon Voight, later replaced by Steve Adams; and the soprano saxophonist Bruce Ackley) was formed in 1979 at a time when jazz was supposedly dead. The group took its inspiration from the work of musicians such as Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, and Steve Lacy, all of whom had worked with new compositional techniques and approaches to improvisation. From the outset, Rova flouted dogma, putting a premium on group interaction and eschewing the stultifying head-solo-head approach of most jazz. The group embraced the complexities of contempory music—both composed and improvised—and found a way to seamlessly weave them together into a music that had the density and thorniness of Monk, the lushness of Ellington, and the angularity—and occasionally the austerity—of Webern. In Rova’s hands, the twelve-bar blues came face to face with twelve-tone music.

For its 2003 version of Ascension, performed as part of its 25th-anniversary concert series (recently released as “Electric Ascension” on the Atavistic label), Rova augmented itself as it had in 1995. But instead of horns, it added strings and electronics, opening up a new range of possibilities. The “Orchestrova” is broken into three sub-groups: Rova; strings (the violinsts Carla Kihlstedt and Jenny Scheinman); and rhythm & noise (the electronics player Chris Brown; the electric guitarist Nels Cline; the electric bassist Fred Frith; the drummer Donald Robinson; the drum machine and sampler player Ikue More; and the turntable and electronics player Otomo Yoshihide). Unlike its earlier version and Coltrane’s, the musicians don’t solo individually, but improvise in clusters of three to four.

Ackley, for example, solos with Scheinman, Frith and Robinson. On the 1995 version he played tenor, but here he plays soprano, his main horn, and one on which he has few equals. Scheinman’s double stops and aggressive bowing on pedal points give him the space he needs to fling tonal arabesques into the air. With wry precision and beautiful tone—more akin to Steve Lacy’s crisp chisel than Coltrane’s snake-charmer—he proves that intensity can go hand in hand with deft and subtle improvising. When Scheinman senses an opening, she winds around Ackley’s tone clusters, forming a musical Mobius strip. A decrescendo is the calm before the storm; the other players, on cue, return at full throttle, leading into the next cluster.

Various changes are cued by hand signals, something Coltrane may also have done. “Coltrane probably didn’t use more than a few hand gestures to indicate when things should move on and who would solo next, or when the next ensemble passage should happen,” Ackley told me. “After all, his original version was simply a head, followed by a string of solos alternating with ensemble blowing passages and wouldn’t require more than the simplest hand gestures to hold things together.”

These cues would have served Coltrane’s purpose because he probably never intended for a definitive map of the piece to exist. After all, Ascension is about freedom and fluxion. For the Orchestrova, this allowed the various stylistic tendencies of its members to be used to full advantage while remaining true to the piece, not unlike the way countless variations of the blues in jazz remain true to something fundamental and indescribable that is deeper than the chord changes or the form.

For the Orchestrova performance, Ackley told me, fellow Rova member Jon Raskin sketched out melodic ideas along with related scales and harmonies based on his own listening to and interpretation of Coltrane’s Ascension. “Then he and Larry Ochs put together a map for moving through the piece, showing where ensemble sections would happen, solos, duos, trios and various other groupings. Some of the ensemble sections have cued material—mostly sketches from the head, or harmonic information. Some of the ensemble sections are open. As the piece developed, we began to introduce optional hand signals for rudimentary control of the flow of events. It’s all pretty basic at this point; the piece doesn’t need to be micromanaged, and a deeper level of 'radar'—the system of hand-cued events Rova uses in much of its music—would require longer rehearsal times and more premeditation than is probably appropriate for Ascension.”

Indeed, Ascension’s complexities arise not from structure or cues, but from the knotty whorl of counterpoint that comes from group improvisation. The result is exhilarating, all the more so in the Orchestrova version because of the color and texture added by the strings and electronics.

This is not music that can be listened to casually. Coltrane’s version clocks in at 40 minutes, and Rova’s stretches over an hour. Taking it all in can be taxing, and the quieter moments do little to temper the intensity. The Orchestrova recording is broken into tracks, permitting the listener to tackle the piece in sections. I don’t recommend this. The beauty of Ascension lies in its length. Like a Mahler symphony, layers and textures create a cumulative effect that can only be felt after listening to the entire piece.

I asked Ackley if the key to Ascension is that the players can go wherever the impulse takes them as long as they find their way home. “I think that’s right,” he said, “but I generally feel that way about improvised music anyhow. As for Ascension, it is one of the most significant pieces for me; it’s completely unique in Coltrane’s canon, and it introduced so many new players who would shape the jazz to come. Coltrane brought whole histories—his own, his supporting players’, and the entire jazz tradition—to bear in Ascension by leaving so much to chance.”

In doing so, Coltrane gave those who followed him the chance to create new histories—an opportunity that Rova and many others have embraced with gusto.

Hearings: Jenny Scheinman

One of the more interesting musicians on the scene these days is the violinist Jenny Scheinman. A tall, lanky woman with penetrating eyes—they seem to take in everything in the room as she gazes at the audience—Scheinman is a subtle and quiet improviser. Though her roots are in folk and country (where her singing often shares the stage with her playing), she performs regularly with musicians from the jazz and improvised music scene, including the guitarist Bill Frisell and the Rova saxophone quartet, and in all these situations she acquits herself nicely.

Last week she played an engagement at the Jazz Standard in New York with the drummer Paul Motian and the pianist Jason Moran. Both reside on the highest peaks of the jazz world, though Motian—now in his 70s—has been there far longer than Moran. Motian’s drumming is unique; he plays quietly, not keeping time so much as creating segments of time and rhythm that swirl like small eddies. He almost always uses brushes. There is passion and energy here—his playing is like a lover’s quarrel played out in whispers. The result is plenty of room for players on the front line to come up with fresh ideas, to play freely but not stray. Moran has a wide palette, and in a post-Cecil Taylor world has found a way to integrate most of the pre-Cecil Taylor approaches into something resembling a personal voice.

It would seem like an ideal setting for Scheinman. Her tunes are folksy, and when heard in a small room such as Barbes in Brooklyn—where she holds forth every Tuesday—they have a quiet and elemental conviction. They seem as if they are already in the folk repertoire, while folk tunes seem as if they could have been written by her, so deeply has she immersed herself in their secrets. Her improvisations never stray far from the tune; the outline is always present, even as she peels off a few layers to probe some inner points. She might play a chorus that consists of a few long-drawn whole notes, move to an arpeggiated variation of the theme, then return to rests and long tones. This sort of approach—pacing, if you will—is all the more pleasing in an age of extreme virtuosity and technique-for-its-own-sake.

And for the most part it worked at the Standard. All three musicians blended well, and found common ground on both Scheinman's originals, as well as on tunes by Ellington and Motian (who also writes with a folkish bent). The great alto saxophonist Lee Konitz even took the stage for two tunes at the end of the set, and the bridge between Scheinman's world and his was apparent. But it seemed to me that Scheinman didn’t take enough advantage of the magic that Motian and Moran are capable of producing. Some of Motian’s most amazing records have been with Frisell and the tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano (check out the group’s recent release, “I Have the Room Above Her”). Lovano is a big-toned tenor player who comes from Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins, but who can also play with the sweetness of Stan Getz or the rawness of Albert Ayler. With Motian behind him, Lovano weaves fantastic lines, richly melodic and rhythmically tensile. Never locked into a straight groove, he tells a tall tale.

I have heard Scheinman dabble with fire. On Rova’s “Electric Ascension,” she plays aggressively and forcefully—the music demands it. I would have liked more of that at the Standard, more risk taking, more of a leap from the folk to the free. You can’t fall with Motian behind you; the cracks and crevices of his rhythms are not a trap, but a means to freedom, to a coaxing out of the new and slightly dangerous. I hope Scheinman will continue to play with him, because she’s capable of using his genius to find untapped beauty—and danger—in her own music.