There’s her five, sometimes six-piece ensemble Be Bread in which she plays harmonium (she traveled to India to study the instrument) as well as piano. Knock On the Sky, a project premiered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2006, combined architectural set design, Japanese butoh choreography, video, and Melford’s compositions inspired by jazz and Asian folk tunes. Happy Whistlings, featuring ensemble works inspired by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s  Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, a history of indigenous America’s fall to the old world, has morphed to include dance, film and a broader array of music. The effort’s name has changed, too; it’s now Snowy Egret. Currently, her most visible collaboration, the one making an appearance Wednesday [MARCH 28] at the Gig, is Trio M with the bassist Mark Dresser and the drummer Matt Wilson. Excluding her infrequent solo work and duos with free-thinking saxophonist-clarinetist Marty Ehrlich, it’s the most modest of her projects in size. And it focuses exclusively on music, though music inspired by everything from classical Middle Eastern poetry to bit-part, comic actors.

Trio M was conceived when Melford moved to California in 2004 to teach improvisation and jazz at UC Berkeley and discovered that bassist Dresser, whom she knew from the New York music scene, had relocated to San Diego. “We used to live across from one another in Prospect Park in Brooklyn and had played together in other people’s bands,” Medford told Pasatiempo in a phone call from her campus office. “But we had never worked together just the two of us. Mark suggested, ‘now that we’re both in California, we have to play together.’ So we started playing duos and trios and we talked about who should be the drummer and we both thought of Matt (Wilson). We played a concert in La Jolla at the Athenaeum Arts and Music Library and it was such a great first concert we started brainstorming about how we could keep this going.’

The threesome released their first recording Big Picture on the Cryptogramophone label in 2007. Their most recent came late last year from the German Enja label and takes its name, The Guest House, from a poem by the 13the century Persian poet and mystic Rumi. “Basically, the poem says you should welcome everything that comes into your life whether sadness or pleasure or firestorm; that you’re like a guest house and whatever comes into your life should be welcomed. I’ve titled a number of pieces after poems from Rumi.”

The Guest House is a diverse collection of rhythms, moods and attitudes. All three members contribute compositions which explains why there’s so much varied personality on display. Melford’s pensive chamber piece “Even Birds Have Homes (To Return To)” has impressionistic qualities. Drummer Wilson’s bouncy, comedic “Don Knotts” is a smile-inducing jazz portrait. Bassist Dresser’s “Tele Mojo” begins as a free-form exchange between piano and bowed bass before becoming something of a twisted samba. Their approach, Melford said, is democratic. “We’re a trio, yes, but not a piano trio in the traditional sense. We’ve taken off from the place where (pianists) Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett took the trio is the last half of the 20^th century. We really think of it as less of a piano-led group and more of it as three individual instruments finding common ground. There’s no hierarchy. Anyone can solo at any time. It’s a three-way conversation between friends.”

Melford grew up in Evanston, Illinois and shows the influence of Chicago’s Association For the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the free jazz organization that’s included such stalwart improvisers as saxophonist Joseph Jarman, trumpeter Lester Bowie, composer-saxophonist Anthony Braxton, saxophonist Henry Threadgill, violinist LeRoy Jenkins and composer-pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. She attended the Cornish College of Arts in Seattle and The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington where she studied with pianist Art Lande. Early on, she worked in the bands of Threadgill, Jarman, Jenkins and cornetist Butch Morris, experimenters all. Along the way she took lessons from respected improvisors Don Pullen and Jacki Byard, both of whom had ties to jazz legend Charles Mingus.

“Even after taking a few lessons from Don [Pullen] and Jacki Byard, people who were huge heroes to me, I still consider myself something of an autodidact,” Melford said. “At the time I took a few lessons from them, I was still trying to be a jazz pianist, learning standards and the jazz lexicon. Both of them had found their own way out of jazz stricture through working with Mingus, found their own means of breaking through those conventions that I was dealing with. When I started to do that for myself and looking for guidance, I asked [Pullen] about it and he said, ‘that’s a great problem and I know you’ll find a good solution.’ He knew it was something I had to find for myself.”

She cites Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell as being highly influential to her compositional style. She didn’t meet Mitchell until a tour of Europe on which she shared the bill with Mitchell’s large ensemble. “His approach to playing and composing, the way he develops this enormous palette of sound and color, the way he uses space, it was all terribly inspiring. It’s not that I want to sound like [Mitchell, Jarmen, Pullen, Byard] but they showed me how to find my own voice and why I should be willing to consider any idea, any art form as material for the music.”

Is that why she takes on so many projects? Does she ever feel like she’s taken on too much? “I ask myself the same thing when I’m overwhelmed with everything. Every project I do, every different person I work with brings out a different aspect of my musical expression. It puts the music in a new context for me. I’m always looking for fresh approaches and fresh ways of working. But why I take on so many [projects]? It’s just my personality, I guess.”

Wilson and Dresser have had equally distinguished and unique careers. The drummer, who’s recently gained accolades for  the recording An Attitude For Gratitude from his Arts & Crafts ensemble, is a first-call percussionist who’s worked with guitarist John Scofield, saxophonists Joe Lovano and Lee Konitz, bassist Charlie Haden and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Dresser, who’s resume includes recordings with saxophonist’s John Zorn, Jane Ira Bloom, and Time Berne; trumpeter Dave Douglas and composer Braxton’s large ensemble, is also known for his multi-discipline projects, having teamed with sculptor Robert Taplin, experimental film maker Sarah Jane Lapp and, like Melford, San Francisco celebrity chef Paul Canales (“Like jazz, there’s a lot of improvisation involved in cooking,” Melford said.) Melford has also been involved in Dresser’s “telematic” concerts, collaborations between musicians in different locations who communicate through wireless and various computer technologies. His first such concert in 2007 featured 30 musicians split between Stanford University, the University of California-San Diego and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. Melford said she was skeptical of the concept at first but the results have made her a convert. “It’s more than recreating a venue at the virtual level,” she explained. “We have to ask, what is this venue, what role does the space between us play, how can we make music in the same way we communicate? It’s a fantastic project to be engaged in.”

Melford said her teaching duties have become a necessary part of her creative process as well as her career (Trio M will conduct a workshop at the Gig the afternoon before the concert). “It’s a lot to juggle but I have a really wonderful synergistic relationship with my students. I’ve become more aware of my process, more reflective and inspired by my students. Teaching is time consuming, of course, but also very nourishing to my work.”–Cabbage Rabbit

Are artists creating symbols and new representations of our technologically-enhanced culture? Certainly they’re employing technology to make art, in the form of computer generated images, synthesized audio and enhanced videos. But where are the symbols, even if made using traditional methods, for the way contemporary society shares, relates and communicates? Consider cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum’s four-part suite Apparent Distance, commissioned through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundations’ Chamber Music America’s New Jazz Works Program. Despite its mostly acoustic instrumentation, it’s all here to be heard: inter-connectedness, flashing images, viral content, the rants and alienation, the unexpected crash. And it’s all done in clashingly brilliant style with old-school cornet, tuba or bass trombone, saxophone, drums, acoustic bass and one electric instrument: guitar. What’s different from all the other avant garde music produced in the last 60 years is the relationship—you might say interface—between instruments, how one speaks its mind while another, or several,  comment in real time. Tempos range from hyper to dial-up.  Mary Halvorson’s guitar provides all the static, feedback and raw power that the suite needs, even as saxophonist John Hobbs wails in human frustration. Bynum’s function is to malfunction. His cornet stutters and short-circuits before it comes up with things truly amazing. In its abbreviated-way, Apparent Distance is as distracting as texting. Ironically, the only section not available as an MP3 is titled “Source.”

When Gil Scott-Heron died last May at the age of 62 nearly all the obituaries saluted him as “the Godfather of Rap.” It was a title he modestly denied when I interviewed him in 1995, shortly after his recording Spirits had come out. Poet, novelist, R&B musician and social activist, Scott-Heron had influenced the rhyme and rhythms of what would become the rap movement. But the content of his message, contained in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” “Save the Children,” and dozens of other socially-conscious songs and politically-contrary lyrics, seemed largely ignored by the commercially-intent rap movement he supposedly had inspired.

The interview was a difficult endeavor that saw him cancel an arranged face-to-face, postpone a handful of phone appointments and eventually make contact as he drove around New York’s west side. At key moments in the conversation, the connection would break up and I was left wondering what exactly he had said. I suspected the man was occupied with a mission I could only guess at. By the time he died, it was well known that the suspicions I harbored were well founded.

That someone of such achievement, someone of such compassion and determination would succumb to the very evils he had sung about in “The Bottle” and “Angel Dust” is the unspoken heart of The Last Holiday, Scott-Heron’s recently released memoir. By the time he passed, Scott-Heron had spent a fair portion of his last years in jail for cocaine possession, had confessed to battles with addiction and had revealed he was HIV positive. As a young man, he was talented, ambitious (despite “a complete dedication to marijuana”) and fearless in pursuing his goals. What happened?

The omission of any hint of Scott-Heron’s lifestyle struggles puts a huge hole in the memoir, especially considering that the book was written during those last years and that drug use may have even influenced its writing. It’s especially disappointing considering the honesty and excellence of the book’s first half.

The stand-out tune from Spirits was “Message To the Messengers,” a plea for that generation’s rap stars to show some respect for their elders and what had gone down before. ““[Rappers] have to know they’re not going through anything new” he told me, “it’s the same stuff I went through back then. They’ve got to remember it’s not about them. It’s about community and the people.”

That’s exactly what the book’s first several fascinating chapters are about, community and people. It addresses the years between his childhood in small-town Tennessee to his signing with Clive Davis’ Arista Records. This journey makes for a compelling, even inspiring story. Scott-Heron acknowledges the help he had along the way, including that from a young white English teacher named Nettie Leaf who challenged him to read John Knowles A Separate Peace, a book he thought was “white noise about white people.”  Leaf recognized his promise as a writer and helped him get into a private school that would challenge both his intellect and his social skills. He credits his mother with helping him develop his style and reveals that it was she who, “provided the punch line” for his classic complaint against misplaced priorities,  “Whitey On the Moon.” She also suggested mimicking Langston Hughes by repeating the opening line of the poem—” a rat done bit my sister Nell…”

And he worked hard. Presidential candidates who have suggested there’s no work ethic in America’s underclass should read Scott-Heron’s description of employment at age 14 as a dishwasher in a steaming restaurant kitchen and how he sometimes held down multiple jobs to keep himself in school books. It’s thrilling to read how success –not always the case–follows his hard work.

The early sections devoted to his upbringing by his grandmother in Jackson, Tennessee, his eventual move to New York to join his mother, his hot-bloodied pursuit of an education and his eventual recording success even as he coveted a career as a novelist are strong stuff, written with the kind of rhythm and word play expected of someone whose seen as a spiritual inspiration of the rap movement. But then the book changes purpose as its focus shifts to Stevie Wonder and the effort to establish a holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King. It’s as if Scott-Heron has gone into denial and lost his abilities for self-examination. While the sections on Wonder are worthy in that they establish his important role in securing the King holiday –remember Wonder’s joyful 1981 song “Happy Birthday”?—we didn’t come this far with Scott-Heron to see him disappear.

Not only is the focus lost, the writing deteriorates and the book’s construction suddenly seems haphazard.  An excerpt from a long-held Scott-Heron project called “The Artist” seem to fall in as if from the moon. Chapters lurch from story to story without connection. Sprinkled throughout the text are poems, written in rhyming couplets, some deserving a backbeat and a melody line to carry their worthy message forward, clumsy others just waiting to be forgotten. When one of these poems expressing  the hope that morning coffee, “Will hit the right spot and somehow make it clear/What the hell’s going on? What am I doing here?”  we can’t help wonder right along with him.

The unevenness of the text is probably due to the start-and-stop way it was written over his last decade or so.  The book seems to be of two minds and of the two the first is better. Even as the narrative starts to skip like a damaged recording, there are some great moments as Scott-Heron jumps ahead and out of his life to consider the election of Ronald Reagan, and his feelings on joining the Wonderlove tour. We feel the innocent excitement of the book’s first half when Scott-Heron stands on stage next to a child-like Michael Jackson and when he recalls Jesse Jackson giving an election speech at the San Diego Convention Center in 1984. But largely in the book’s second half, the narrative flow, the thing that made so many of his musical verses strong, is missing.

It’s strange to realize once finishing the book that despite all the talk of “spirits” who helped him along the way he completely avoids addressing the devils that did him in. What a disappointment it is – and telling– to know that someone who wrote so honestly about his early life, who penned lyrics that touched a generation with their biting commentary and hopeful resolution, would ignore the struggle that consumed the last years of his life. The Last Holiday seems to stray from its intended themes and leave us with one that’s unintended: the messenger losing sight of the message. It’s as if he wants to tell us, as he does about his early years, but as during that long ago interview, the connection is always breaking up.–Cabbage Rabbit

Jonathan Lethem’s last novel, Chronic City, is about an aging, self-conscious child star and pop culture icon, Chase Insteadman, who befriends a faded pop culture critic, Perkus Tooth. Tooth once wrote for Rolling Stone but now issues his judgments on paste-up broadside collages that range across genres and generations. He smokes copious amounts of high-grade marijuana while chasing the meaning-of-it-all through obscure films, celebrity conspiracies and forgotten music.

That there’s something of Lethem in both characters is apparent reading his collection of essays, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. The author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, those slow-to-fade glories of nearly a decade and more ago, once wrote a feature for Rolling Stone comparing James Brown to Kurt Vonnegut’s time-lost Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse-Five. In that act, he joined Brown’s band members in a hazy cloud of hemp. His collected non-fictions, much like Tooth’s broadsides, are collages that considers everything from G.K. Chesterton’s detective fantasy The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare to Donald Sutherland’s buttocks. Along the way, not coincidentally, we learn quite a bit about Jonathan Lethem.

Like Tooth, the 47-year-old Lethem spends a lot of time looking back. In a 2007 piece reprinted from The New York Times Magazine, he marvels at Keith Carradine’s death scene in Robert Altman’s 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller. In a 2009 piece for ultra-trendy literary monthly The Believer, he compares characters in Nathaniel West’s 1933 novella Miss Lonelyhearts  to the brick-chucking Ignatz Mouse in George Herriman’s long-running comic strip Krazy Kat (1913-1944). In each case, to quote a hipster friend, his insight is “totally now.”

The most thoughtful pieces are the mostly previously-unpublished ones that consider his presence inside the essays. He worries that these, “so-called ‘non-fictions’ were themselves artful imposters…” His voice, he says, is a matter of conscious invention: “I’ve never managed a routine book review, let alone an essay I thought worth reprinting, without first having to invent a character who’d be issuing the remarks…” This confession comes on the book’s very first and second pages under the clever heading of “Undressing ‘Me,’ Addressing ‘You’.” Readers have to wonder:  Who or what is really of interest here?

The answer, of course, is everything; Lethem included. Many of the essays, even when considering Italo Calvino or Marlin Brando, are self-reflecting. These bits of absorption facilitate Lethem’s ability to link everything. The things we learn about him —  his difficulties as a book store clerk, that at the age of 12 he joined his father drawing nude models,  that he’d “sooner drown in books than die in space where I can hear only myself scream” — are never presented as stand-alone, fun facts, like which dessert a Kardashian sister favors, but in a context relevant to larger cultural issues.

In the title essay reprinted from Harper’s, subtitled “A plagiarism,” Lethem makes an argument that art inspires art, sometimes word for word. Along the way he cites examples from Nabokov, Bob Dylan, The Flintstones, Leonard Bernstein and Muddy Waters. It’s fascinating to explore culture with one who knows so much of it, someone who travels easily between genres and generations. Sample at random from the book, as he suggests, and be rewarded. But his broad knowledge, while impressive, isn’t the point. With Lethem, it’s the thought that counts.–Cabbage Rabbit

Seasons, recorded live at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a collaboration between a rising guitarist-composer, three of his guitar-virtuoso colleagues and a master guitar maker. The guitar maker, John Monteleone, commissioned this work for a quartet of acoustic instruments he built, each designed with a particular season in mind. Likewise, the music commissioned to be performed on these instruments, like Vivaldi’s famous suite, was inspired by seasonal moods and climates. Composer Wilson is best known for taking the guitar from its traditional jazz roles into wider context. Here, he writes without regard to category, bringing lyrical finesse and the kind of harmonic depth available only to this unique string quartet. His fellow guitarists are equally distinguished:  Steve Cardenas, who’s worked with a broad swath of musicians including Norah Jones, Paul McCandless and the late Paul Motian; Brazilian Chico Pinheiro who teamed with Wilson on the excellent 2007 recoding Nova; and Julian Lage, a recent member of vibraphonist Gary Burton’s quartet. The four combine on Wilson’s expressive material for a harmonically rich, intuitively agile sound. Their play is so seamless it’s as if Monteleone had designed a 24-stringed instrument and bred a 40-fingered virtuosos to play it. Each guitarist’s style is showcased in a seasons-inspired solo turn. An accompanying DVD documents the suite’s live performance and serves as a meditation on guitars, guitarists, and the composer’s craft. Watch, listen, and marvel.   –Cabbage Rabbit

DAVID MURRAY CUBAN ENSEMBLE PLAYS NAT KING COLE EN ESPANOl;   Motema. Nothing like the original except the tunes. Murray, always adept at finding new ways to frame his music, works with a nine-piece ensemble and strings to do what he does best: cry, caterwaul, lose control (never; it only sounds like it) and get fresh during ballads. More to come on this outstanding recording.

FURTHER EXPLORATIONS, Chick Corea, Eddie Gomez, Paul Motian; Concord Jazz, release date: January 17,2012. Recorded live at the Blue Note in NYC and celebrating the 50th anniversary of the release of Bill Evans Explorations this two-disc set warms us with the sort of interplay that LaFaro and Motian attained on the original. Nobody would mistake Cora for Evans and that’s the beauty of it. For the late Motian, an extension, a perfect circle.

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY SOUNDTRACK  by Alberto Iglesias; Silva Screen Records. Pedro Almovodar’s favorite composer has strung together a variety of downbeat themes that sound as a continuous whole. We hear some John Adams, some Phillip Glass, even some Steve Reich in this moody music. More on this later as well.  

Writer Jim Harrison is to letters what Woody Allen is to film. If that seems a stretch, consider: both are prolific, releasing a new work (or more) yearly. Both were born during the Depression, two years apart, both in December. Both mix drama and comedy into something that’s entertaining as well as thought provoking. Both are fixed on the complications resulting from relationships and sex. Both are obsessed with mortality. Both have tried their hand at writing from a woman’s point-of-view. Both are connected to specific locations, Harrison to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Allen to Manhattan’s Upper Westside (and more recently, Barcelona and Paris). Both are revered in France.

Okay, it’s still a stretch. The grizzled, one-eyed novelist and poet who wrote Legends of the Fall and some 30 other volumes of prose and poetry is more at home in the outdoors than the bespectacled urbanite who wrote and directed Interiors (no matter how much  of A Midsummer’s Night Sex Comedy takes place outdoors) . And while Harrison’s characters, like Allen’s, often dwell on the fact that their days, as everyone’s, are numbered, they don’t all take it personally. They’re more stoical about it.

Take 65-year-old Detective Sunderson from Harrison latest novel The Great Leader. “He thought just because you’re older doesn’t mean that death is imminent every day. There’s generally a tip-off when it’s coming.” Tips, being the detective’s stock-and-trade, need to be acted on. And Sunderson’s been given more than a few.

If your hunch is that detective fiction is out of character for someone as literate as Harrison, you’d be half right.  Detective Sunderson doesn’t break from the manly Harrison mold. He’s burly, fond of brook trout, dogs and deer livers.  He has a frustration-inducing appreciation for female posteriors and is prone to use whiskey as a cure. Three years ago, his troubled lifestyle cost him “the world’s finest woman,” according to his niggling 85-year-old mother. It’s his down-home style of introspection, in light of his vices, that stands him apart from the usual sleuth.

Recently retired after a career policing familial abuse, small-time drug dealing, and bear poaching, our detective is hardboiled country-style. When asked why he continues to follow The Great Leader out of the hummocks of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to Arizona and the Sand Hills of Nebraska, he claims he’s investigating the evil connection between religion, money, and sex. A more accurate answer: he’s pursuing himself.

If this doesn’t exactly sound like Manhattan Murder Mystery that’s because it isn’t.  There are plenty of dark moments and intimations of mortality in The Great Leader, though balanced by comic action and witty asides. Plot? Only the barest, vulture-picked bones. Along the way, Sunderson is threatened with a sodomy charge, has a run-in with a Mexican drug kingpin, eats prodigiously and suffers gout. It’s not a thriller and there’s not a lot of suspense. But if you’re fond of existential puzzles, then The Great Leader is your rib steak.

In this age-of-anxiety sense, The Great Leader is reminiscent of Paul Auster’s1985 mystery City of Glass, an existential detective yarn in which the unraveling thread of the central charter’s psyche is more knotty than the mystery he’s trying to solve. While Auster’s tale is surreal, Harrison’s is well-grounded. Auster says, “nothing is real, except chance.” Harrison counters, “there is no truth, only stories. “ As a detective, Sunderson‘s heard plenty.

The real mystery here is Sunderson himself. Even as he plots the downfall of the cult leader for his taste in 12-year-olds, he ogles his 16-year-old neighbor girl, an exhibitionist whose bedroom window is just 30 feet from his. That and the excitement he feels almost every time a woman bends over cause him to curse “the distracting nuisance” of the biological imperative, like “carrying around a backpack full of cow manure.”

Harrison is skilled at straight-talking life’s big issues and the book is full of homily. “Crime did pay but usually very little,” Sunderson observes. Or, when marveling at the rejuvenating powers of time spent in the wild, “A creek is more powerful than despair.”

Not all such insight seems worthy: “Men would say they were as horny as a toad but who among them knew if a toad was horny?” Sometimes, Harrison’s dialog seems unnaturally smart, as when a tough plainclothes cop, describing religion as a drug, says, “you know, the Marxian opiate of the people.”

But by and large, Sunderland’s social and political one-liners give a jolt on almost every page. He’s outspoken on religion, Republicans, the FBI, American history (especially when it came to Native Americans), 9-11 and justice (“When a guy with four DUIs runs over a kid and receives less time than a college kid with a half-pound of pot…”); all tempered by his unruly self-doubt: “…what were his conclusions worth? Hadn’t he been put out to pasture?”

Sunderson eventually chases down a sort of religion of his own, one anchored in extended family and the natural world. Like Alvy Singer in Allen’s Annie Hall, he finds solace in his surroundings, a beauty and buzz of life that’s present no matter which landscape he’s in. It’s this revelation that helps him get his man. I won’t tell you which one.–Cabbage Rabbit

Joe Henry is best known in service to others, a writer of songs for stars (Madonna “Don’t Tell Me To Stop”) and producer to everyone from Meshell Ndegéocello and Ani DiFranco to Elvis Costello and Mose Allison. His own recordings tend to be noisy affairs with confessional, expressionistic poetry set to pop-savvy melodies framed in cartoonish cacophony. Over the years, he’s included jazz musicians including Brad Mehldau, Don Byron and Ornette Coleman to bring added spark and soulfulness to match his often surreal words. Reverie manages the soulfulness without the static. It’s stripped down Henry with even more obscure lyrics (“I keep wooden boxes like traps strung with wire/In the light of old ties, piled and on fire”). The acoustic quartet of guitar, piano, bass, and drums is occasionally decorated with pump organ, added guitarist Marc Ribot’s ukulele, and backup vocals from Irish singer-songwriter Lisa Hannigan. The effect is even more melancholy than the often down-beat singer has conveyed in the past, and with reason. “Room At Arles,” dedicated to the late, tragic Vic Chesnutt, is particularly somber (“The curtains wave a flag to say/This afternoon is done/And giving in to evening who has/Beat him like a brother”). Despite the mood and minimalism, Reverie is still “raucous and fractured and noisy” as he asserts in the liner notes’ dedication to his parents. And that’s just the way we Henry fans like it.   –Cabbage Rabbit

Pianist Keith Jarrett’s quarter-century of trio recordings with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette sustains his reputation as one of music’s most inventive improvisers. But it’s his infrequent solo work, beginning with his 1971 release Facing You, that best displays his improvisational genius. Rio, recorded live in the Brazilian city in April of this year, reflects the 66-year-old keyboardist’s entire canon, a body of work that includes excursions into Bach and Mozart as well as jazz standards. Unlike his early solo recordings with their long, evolving variations on rhythmic and melodic themes, Rio is a collection of 16 miniatures that range across blues, impressionism, contemporary boogie-woogie and the avant-garde. The wide variety of material here, including tango-tinged dances and Middle-Eastern moods, spotlioght the pianist’s wide and ambitious vocabulary. It’s hard to believe that these are spontaneous improvisations, as Jarrett has explained in recent interviews. Even the most modern, formless excursions have a substance that lends shape to their off-beat harmonics and aggressive tempos. Best are the sensitive, emotionally-revealing pieces (Jarrett recently divorced after 30 years of marriage) that develop narratives a short story writer could envy. If he sometimes lacks a way to end his stories—more than a few seem to just tail off—it’s easy to excuse him by the wonderful path each piece has taken. –Cabbage Rabbit

REINCARNATION OF A LOVE BIRD, Paul Motian and the Electric Bebop Band ; JMT, recorded June 1994. Motian had a way of layering his sound against the ring of electric guitars and for a while in the ’90s had bands that doubled up on them and saxophones (see Garden of Eden, below). Here’s it’s Kurt Rosenwinkel and Wolfgang Muthspiel adding sustained atmospherics and plucky bebop lines. This may be the best example of Motian’s skill at choosing and reworking jazz standards, taking them from innovators including Monk, Miles, Mingus, Bird and Gillespie. And while there’s only one Motian original, “Split Descision” performed twice, beginning and  end, it illustrates how Motian, that most color-conscious drummer, was extending the moods and harmonic construction of the greats he covers. Would we have pulled this out if the man hadn’t passed? Eventually. Motian’s in our infrequent rotation list, someone we return to again and again as time rolls on.

GARDEN OF EDEN, Paul Motian Band; ECM, recorded November, 2004. We pulled this out a couple weeks back when the man was still on the planet and haven’t let go. Another example of Motian’s two-guitar,-two sax ensemble; this time with seven Motian originals of the kind that send us (the drummer also gets great contributions from his sidemen; hear Muthspiel’s “Waseenonet” from Reincarnation above, saxophonist Chris Cheek’s “Desert Dream” here. What we said before: “Paul Motian plays drums like Bill Evans played piano. Here’s it’s in support of a larger group; the tangle of guitars (Steve Cardenas, Ben Monder, Jakob Bro), brother saxophones of Chris Cheek, Tony Malaby, the try-this-on-for size bass of Jerome Harris. Some Mingus, some originals from the band. But it’s Motian’s “Mesmer” that has a mesmerized. It’s like an Ornette tune at half-speed; inviting, entrancing and ultimately about the human condition.” I forgot to mention the great rework of Mingus’ “Pithecanthropus Erectus.”

MICHAEL TIPPETT DIVERTIMERNTO ON “SELINGER’S ROUND,’ LITTLE MUSIC FOR STRING ORCHESTRA, THE HEART’S ASSURANCE, CONCERTO FOR DOUBLE STRING ORCHESTRA, City of Londo Sinfonia condcuted by Richard Hickox; Chandos, recorded March, 1995. There’s a variety of music here, indicating a range not often associated with the 20th century English composer. Sure, the dancing  “sprung” rhythms of the Concerto catch our off-beat ears but it’s the audible empathy for simple lives, especially heard in the Lament from “Sellinger’s Round” that sticks with us, so much that tenor John Mark Ainsley has to wrestle us back in “The Heat’s Assurance” with a display of  compassion (the music ponders a woman’s suicide, inspired by poets killed in World War II) and passion lost.

APPEARING NIGHTLY,Carla Bley and Her Remarkable Big Band; ECM, 2007. Lively, playful, wonderfully arranged music that jumps jives and gets serious all in a matter of moments. Full of respect for the tradition as well as inside jokes and running gags, the bulk of them perpetrated by trumpeter Lew Soloff. The 25 minute suite that lends the disc its title is a historical overview with the band shouting jive to accent the period feel. “Greasy Gravy” and “Bad Coffee” burns with sax and trumpet reflux (although at different tempos). Emotional highpoint: when the trombone (is it Beppe Calamosca?) blares a warning above the groove and shimmer from Bley-mates bassist Steve Swallow and Karen Mantler on organ. Did I mention Steve Swallow? Who else could play with this noisy of a band and sound like an entire section on his own?