Last week, at Bar Lunàtico, I played with saxophonist Stacy Dillard, bassist Vicente Archer, and pianist Ethan Iverson, the first time the four of us had ever played together. It was a great gig— we immediately found common ground, and I felt the limitless possibilities of jazz. There’s no end to the music: there’s always something new to play, and someone new to play it for.
I’m keeping that going with another show tonight, Tuesday July 23rd, at Barbès in Brooklyn. I’m honored to be joined by three giants: saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet, and bassist Vicente Archer. It’ll be a night of improvisation and tunes by Paul Motian and Ornette Coleman.
Thanks to Cindy McGuirl and Steve Cardenas, we have all of Paul Motian’s tunes to peruse and rediscover. Here’s a look at the tunes of his we’ll play tonight.
When I attended the Banff Jazz Workshop in 2002, saxophonist Chris Potter offhandedly told a group of us students that Paul Motian had recently tried to assemble a trio of himself, Chris Potter, and Keith Jarrett.
I was stunned— what a band! I remembered this anecdote when, in 2009, Motian assembled a trio with Chris Potter and pianist Jason Moran for a live recording at the Village Vanguard. I attended the first set of the week with Loren Stillman, but didn’t hear the album they were making— Lost In A Dream (ECM, 2010)— until the 2020-21 lockdown, when it was unclear when (or even if) we’d hear jazz in a club again.
On “Birdsong”, Moran and Potter approach Paul’s spare, haiku-like melody with reverence. Interestingly, the trio follows Paul’s notation quite literally— the chart indicates quarter notes in Ab lydian in 3/4, with a left hand ostinato, and they play it more-or-less as written. Motian gives texture, contrast, and energy, Moran gently but firmly commits to the tempo, tonality, and form, while Potter rhapsodizes. It’s a tough and elegiac performance, a highlight in Paul’s discography.
“Endless” is from Garden of Eden (ECM, 2006), the final studio recording made by the Electric Bebop Band. Here, it’s a brief, haunting feature for saxophonists Chris Cheek and Tony Malaby in Paul’s trademark rubato, but Motian’s chart indicates a ballad alternating between 3/4, 4/4, and 5/4. The Garden of Eden version is Paul’s interpretation, but his own manuscript suggests other ways of playing the piece.
Until 2005, the final release by Motian’s now-legendary trio with Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell was Triosim (JMT, 1994), somehow a hard-to-find record in 2024. When I checked this morning, there were a few tracks on YouTube, but the complete album wasn’t there. In college, “Monica’s Garden”, a 16-bar swinger moving gently between G major and Eb major was a favorite Paul melody, glad to be playing it tonight.
Joe Lovano’s Sounds of Joy (Enja, 1991), a trio album featuring bassist Anthony Cox and a stunning Ed Blackwell performance from late in Blackwell’s life, concludes with a Motian tune, “23rd Street Theme”. Listening to Blackwell push through Paul’s oblique 12-bar theme, it’s easy to imagine what Motian might have gleaned listening to Blackwell with Dewey and Charlie in the late Sixties in NYC, as I’m told he did.
By the early Eighties, Motian was a part of the inner circle of Ornette’s cohort— there’s a bootleg of Paul playing with Old and New Dreams, Paul on a Dewey Redman gig, and Paul’s own datebooks are filled with undocumented gigs with this crew; Lovano’s recording of “23rd Street Theme” with Blackwell shows how deep the connection really was.
If we’re going to play some Paul Motian music, we have to play some Ornette Coleman too. We rehearsed “Humpty Dumpty” and “The Turnaround” yesterday, we’ll see if we get to them tonight.
Paul Motian was fond of relating one anecdote about Ornette. It was the early Nineties, and Paul bumped into Ornette on the Upper West Side. Briefly catching up, Paul told Ornette that he had formed a bebop band, and that they were playing all the old melodies in unison. According to Paul, Ornette replied with something like “Paul, all music is in unison.”
I know the focus here is on Paul Motian but that Joe Lovano album, "Sounds of Joy", remains one of my favorites and one of the Lovano albums I return to on a regular basis (even after all these years) – it is prime Ed Blackwell!!! Hoipe you have great fun at the gig!!
SO sorry I can't catch this tantalizing date tonight… here's hoping it's the first of many.