As clarinetist, Herman’s timbre was drier than Goodman’s or Shaw’s, but his piping bent-note sound could really drive a band. Herman sang too, in an unassuming boy-next-door way, as if stepping in last-minute to replace the band’s real singer, who was stuck in traffic. He had to cultivate that casual air. In songwriter Isham Jones’s band in 1936, Herman sang “No Greater Love” like a ’20s crooner — through the nose, throwing himself at the lyric. Jones had been at it since 1920, and had his old-school mannerisms. But he also featured a lot of blues; “Blue Prelude” showed how much his men dug Duke Ellington.

When Jones broke the band up in 1936, the jazzier members continued as a co-op fronted by Herman. They kept “Blue Prelude” as their first theme, and kept playing the blues. The ensemble drive (like Woody’s singing) quickly got modernized and streamlined. They played opposite Count Basie at New York’s Roseland. Basie said later, “The only band that ever cut my band was that Woody Herman band.”

Herman’s idol was Ellington, and even Duke was struck by how much Woody could sound like his own suave Johnny Hodges on alto sax. Hodges also showed Herman how to make an entrance; his breakthrough “Woodsheddin’ with Woody” just plays possum, swinging in a light Basie groove, until his clarinet barges in. The compilation Blues on Parade charts the band’s progress from 1937-42, albeit in scrambled order. The earliest item is a swinging update of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Doctor Jazz,” the latest an early Dizzy Gillespie chart with boppish touches, “Down Under.”

Dizzy said in his autobiography that when bebop hit in the early ’40s, all the bands wanted a bop number in the book, but only Herman’s caught the new rhythms without coaching: “All the trumpet players in that band wanted to sound like me.” He hired a couple of women musicians during the War, trumpeter Billie Rogers and vibraphonist Margie Hyams.

Bebop’s influence is all over Herman’s First Herd, founded in 1944, a band with an Ellingtonian array of diverse soloists: vibist Red Norvo, short-lived Dizophile trumpet spitfire Sonny Berman, tenor sax sparkplug Flip Phillips, bassist Chubby Jackson (who played fast and had an extra high string, making his playing sound speeded up), and Bill Harris, a broad toned trombonist of the old school somehow perfect for the new material. (Hear “Bijou,” with an improvised Harris solo that sounds carefully worked out.) The Herd featured hot arrangements by Ralph Burns and Neal Hefti. Igor Stravinsky wrote them his harmonically modern (if rhythmically starchy) “Ebony Concerto.”

Maybe because his band had started as a co-op, Herman was always open to his musicians’ enthusiasms and ideas; the players embroidered Burns’s and Hefti’s charts in rehearsal. In a little over three minutes, the dadaistic “Your Father’s Mustache” crams in scorching trumpet and tenor solos, a quote from Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, a mock-gleeclub vocal, false endings and prime Herman clarinet. They play it tongue-in-cheek with enviable precision. Drummer Buddy Rich, subbing, learned it by ear, and nailed it.

In 1946 they broke up — everyone was doing it. A year later, the business totally tanking, Herman formed his Second Herd, with Stan Getz and Zoot Sims on tenor, that one that recorded Jimmy Giuffre’s classic “Four Brothers,” with its cushy close-harmony saxes pointing the way toward cool jazz.

The standard anthology of the First Herd, and the Second Herd’s first batch, is Columbia’s Blowin’ Up A Storm. The Second Herd’s lesser known final sides were for Capitol, Herman’s next home till 1950. There’s more Getz in his early glory as rapturous tenor balladeer (“Early Autumn”) just before he goes out on his own. But by mid-’49 things start to get weird: cheeky dixieland with harrumphing tuba, and a mocking “Mule Train” sung with Nat King Cole.

In the ’50s Herman had his dips like other swing survivors, but he bounced back once more. In 1964, he recorded the Beatles’ “Things We Said Today,” a feature for his slithery Hodges-style alto, and a sign of things to come. A few years later, his increasingly young, shaggy and amplified crew was playing tunes by Frank Zappa (“America Drinks and Goes Home”), Traffic (“Smiling Phases”), the Temptations (“I Can’t Get Next to You”), Steely Dan (“Kid Charlemagne”) — and “Proud Mary,” “Light My Fire,” “Ma Cherie Amour” and more. If music can be kitsch in a good way, these the-kids-will-dig-it sides qualify.

In those later years Herman also revisited oldies, and kept turning up new talent, like saxophonists Joe Lovano and Scott Hamilton, bassists Marc Johnson and pianist Lyle Mays. Another way Woody Herman stood out from his rivals: He was a pleasure to work for. He rarely lost his temper in public, was married to the same woman forever, and loaned money to acquaintances in need.

It all should have ended better. Late in life the IRS hounded him over back taxes, owing to dubious management by a trusted aide. In 1985 the feds auctioned off the house he’d lived in 40 years — never mind all the money he’d raised for the War effort back when — to a landlord who later tried to evict him over tardy rent. A battery of pro bono lawyers staved that off; donations flowed in from all over. That was in 1987, the year Herman played his last gig, and the year he died. He’d led a big band for 50 years.

Taborn’s ways of sounding out acoustic and electric keyboards come together on violist Mat Maneri’s Sustain of 2001, and his own Junk Magic with Maneri, Bad Plus drummer Dave King and tenor saxist Aaron Stewart. The synthetic beats dripping onto the molasses-slow ensemble on the title track provide a window into Taborn’s open mind. The Sustain rhythm section — Taborn, longtime drumming buddy Gerald Cleaver and bass powerhouse William Parker — later became the co-op Farmers by Nature. But first the pianist had another trio with Cleaver and bassist Chris Lightcap that made the acclaimed Light Made Lighter. (They did a memorable “I Cover the Waterfront.”) Taborn and Cleaver also make a rhythm trio with bassist Michael Formanek, in his quartet.

For all that inventive work and much, much more, it wasn’t till the 2011 release of the solo Avenging Angel that a wider audience noticed how good Craig Taborn is. The music is at once quiet and thrillingly virtuosic; he plumbs the piano’s depths, coaxing out its pure and impure tones. The follow-up, Chants, is for yet another Taborn-Cleaver trio, this one with bassist Thomas Morgan: rollicking music, involved and evolved.

Speaking with eMusic’s Kevin Whitehead in late March, Taborn touched on arcane composing strategies, the influence of electronica on his acoustic music, Sun Ra, Brian Eno, Morton Feldman, and the piano sound on old Blue Note records.

You’ve spoken about approaching piano as a “pure sound source.” For all your knowledge of harmony and music history, you’re really most concerned with getting the instrument to sound.

That’s the way I hear all music. My harmonic and melodic sensibilities exist within a larger world of sound. It mitigates how I hear harmony. Timbre, coloration, overtones, they all affect my choices.

That partly comes from my always being involved with electronic music, with synths alongside the piano. I got my first synthesizer within a year of my first piano lesson — a Moog Satellite followed by a Mini-Moog. I was like 12. Around the same time I learned what a triad was, I’m turning the knobs, figuring out how to make synthesizer sound like a trumpet. The Christmas after that I got a Rhodes electric piano. That was the early ’80s, when digital was just coming in and those older keyboards were really affordable. My parents were finding them in newspaper ads for around 100 bucks.

You’re well-versed in a broad range of music. Is it hard to play one kind at a time?

No. I don’t limit my creative choices based on idiom. It’s all available; the fun is to see how to fit things into the specific music I’m playing. It’s what drives me. I feel very free in an acoustic improvised context to think of electronic, non-tonal music: What would happen if I applied some of those strategies? Bringing in ideas from other musics can help move the music forward.

With Chants, you’ve now documented three very different piano trios with Gerald Cleaver.

The history is strong. We have a language. I like making music with Gerald because we address the specific situation or group. We’re looking to really serve the context, and to see how these situations can be different. Without talking about it, those groups each settle into an identity very quickly. The trick is to let it emerge before imposing any limits on it. Thomas Morgan and William Parker have super-strong identities on the instrument, too, and that’s a key factor.

A really wide beat will set William going.

You’re dealing with that wave. William has such breadth, such a long reach I can feel. I think of Farmers by Nature as a more traditional group. I settle into a zone where I think about the jazz piano tradition, and let that operate more. Not that I block other things out, but I’m thinking of Duke, Monk, Fats Waller. It may not sound like it in the end, because I can’t really play like those guys. There’s always that temptation to play in the tradition of the jazz piano trio, but I know William or Thomas won’t make it sound normal. I can open that door, knowing they won’t box me in.

“Saints” and “Future Perfect” on Chants feature one of the signature jazz sounds of our time: ringing unisons from bass and the pianist’s left hand. It’s the piano-trio-as-power-trio sound.

In that context, it’s an easy way to get the bottom end working. It solves lots of problems having to do with how the music projects. It’s tight, it’s heavy, it speaks to precision and cohesion. It brings things into bold relief — like power riffing in rock bands. But then you can put other things over it.

You do like higher metrical games. I can count out a 43-beat Don Ellis pattern, but don’t get far with “Beat the Ground.”

You could find an ultimate pattern that you could count, but it’s not counted through in the Don Ellis sense. None of the music is constructed around metrical cycles. I deal a lot with multiples, multiple meters that make up even larger groupings. It’s more about doing things modularly; the music can go in different directions. “Beat the Ground” has a larger rhythmic cycle, but Gerald might go through it one time playing against everything, and the next time locking it in. It’s like a pyramid. There’s another rhythm strategy underneath.

I’ve been into building up forms for a long time, so a specific piece’s form is not just one thing: There are larger supportive hierarchies of different complexities. I’ll have three or four layers for people to address with different harmonic and rhythmic structures. You can switch from one to another at will and it all fits. “Beat the Ground” has a whole other improvised section we didn’t record because it would have run too long, where we play over the same form, but with chord changes that mark out a different rhythmic cycle.

As far back as the late ’50s, Sun Ra was dealing with multiples like that: one part’s in 13, another’s in 5, and the drummer plays free. He was way ahead in terms of orchestration. The rational and irrational at the same time: that’s something I work with a lot. Different meters, and then a layer that isn’t even in time, floating over all that.

Even in high school I was into writing and playing in polymeters. Sun Ra was definitely one influence. Another big one was Geri Allen — those late ’80s and early ’90s records you can’t find anymore, on Minor Music or JMT, or The Nurturer. She builds these really nice melodic structures; her ostinatos had architectural and melodic intent.

I’m always looking for ways to achieve more speechlike improvisation. A patterned, grid-like way of playing complicated stuff is too diagrammatic for me. I favor ecstatic playing. The model there is Sonny Rollins, the way he played over bebop tunes in the ’50s. What he plays fits, but it’s very loose and creative. How free can you be, and still hold to the structure? Or, if you play an ostinato with one hand, how free can you be with the other?

On Chant, a lot of the time we hold to the form, but it’s not a mandate. On “Saints,” we never break from it; we always come back around, and mark the end of the form. Intense structure and playing free: Gerald shares that interest, and Thomas too. I’ll think we’re playing free as it happens, but when I listen back to a recording, the form is still in the background. We’d internalized it so much, we never left it.

Your solo record Avenging Angel changed the way people look at you. Did it feel like a breakthrough at the time?

It was a happy day in the studio. I approached it as a way to document this solo music I’d been developing for eight years. I had been thinking about doing that before ECM came into the picture. I had already been talking to Manfred [Eicher, label head and producer] about recording the trio but we hadn’t been able to schedule it, everyone’s so busy. Meanwhile in 2010, I did a week-and-a-half solo tour in Europe, and maybe he got wind of that, because a week later he asked me to do a solo record. I was ready at that point: shedding for hours a day, just practicing and playing exercises to prepare.

It was a best-case scenario: We could record anywhere, and he really understands recording solo piano. And it was fantastic piano! But it was an improvised program, so it really came down to the particular day. That’s the crapshoot. We recorded in Lugano, and I’d been teaching that week at a Swiss jazz camp three hours away — teaching kids how to play jazz. One night I played a solo concert, and then I was driven to Lugano, arriving at like 2 a.m. I was tired the next day going into the studio. When I started playing, things seemed to be clicking. After a couple of pieces I thought, “This is going well.”

You recorded many more pieces than are on the album.

Thirty-two, maybe, altogether? It’s possible more will come out. I’ll have to go back and listen. Some pieces go to the same areas; some others I know were pretty cool. Manfred’s been talking to me about another solo project, but I don’t think it’s developed enough since then, yet.

At the beginning of “Forgetful,” you make acoustic piano sound like a Rhodes: a spectral composer’s illusion.

The piano is a pretty subtle instrument. In the right sonic space, and with an instrument that’s willing, you can get that sound. But it’s also about knowing how to record it. Close miking is good for some things. Wide miking reveals others, the overtones reverberating against the body of the instrument itself. The pianoforte was designed as a concert instrument, to project into a room. Miking has a lot to do with how hard you’re hitting the instrument. At this particular volume, 20 feet away may be optimal. You’re also working with the resonance of the room. Manfred knows how to get a good piano sound. He was very hands-on with the miking.

My ideal, when I’m playing straight-ahead jazz, is the Blue Note-in-the-’50s-and-’60s piano. I always liked that sound, but didn’t know why Wynton Kelly, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill and Cecil Taylor all had it. It was the piano [at engineer Rudy van Gelder's studio] and the way it was miked: That sound projects an identity as much as the player does. That piano had a certain bounce to it. But they got a new one a while ago. Maybe it was beyond its time. (Pianos are like wine: at a certain temperature, they age really well. Then they peak and go down from there.) I hear it’s still in the building, but outside the studio. I’d like to play that once, just to see what the action was like.

Do you hear a relationship between quiet pieces like “This Voice Says So” and ambient music?

That Brian Eno thing is always operating. For me all improvisation is more about paying attention to sound than generating ideas. Attention and manipulation: ambient is one approach to that. It’s the philosophy of John Cage. He was really talking about a way of tending to sound, and I try to give it that level of attention. Morton Feldman always paid attention to decay, to the entire shape of a note. He composed around the idea of what happens after the initiation of events. That gives a different energy to the music.

Lots of jazz improvisation is about always generating ideas: It’s dealing with attacks, always seeking the initiation of events. When you think about Miles, Wayne Shorter, Roscoe Mitchell in the jazz continuum, these deeper guys pay attention to the entire musical event, to the entire shape and bloom of a note — where it’s going and where it ends. When it ceases to be audible and becomes imaginary. That’s the key to a deeper world of music making. The real masters are aware of that, like Gerald, or Thomas, or Mat Maneri. You can tell immediately how aware of that they are. Some musicians don’t pay such close attention — they’re moving on when things are still unfolding.

Now, he has two matching new records out, for complementary quintets. Both albums feature Goldberg’s writing, improvised counterpoint, tenor saxophone, and drummer Ches Smith, and both begin with a little Bach-inspired chorale. On Subatomic Particle Homesick Blues, recorded in 2008, Goldberg shares the front line with trumpeter Ron Miles and tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman. (Devin Hoff’s on bass; Scott Amendola replaces Smith on “The Because Of” and “Possible.”) The 2012 recording Unfold Ordinary Mind has Wilco’s Nels Cline on guitar, and contrasting tenor players in hard-toned Rob Sudduth and furry-sounding Ellery Eskelin. In that quintet Ben takes the bassist’s role, playing the low contra-alto clarinet.

In between those two, Goldberg recorded Go Home with Miles, Amendola and guitarist Charlie Hunter, which came out in 2009. eMusic’s Kevin Whitehead spoke with Goldberg about Bob Dylan, working with new collaborators, and his new records.

You recently posted an article about the development of the New Klezmer Trio, a band where you took old techniques and came up with new music based on the same principles. Your later Steve Lacy tribute did something like that too: took some of his ideas about instrumentation and cuckoo-clockwork tunes, and made them your own.

We’re all drawn to certain things very strongly; they wake up something in you. Then we try to find out what’s at the heart of it. As much as you’re moving toward something else, you’re also moving toward your own heart. What energizes me is never knowing how it’s all going to turn out. The best we can do is put the best ingredients in, and work with them to create something tasty. For the last eight years, Bach chorales have been a big ingredient.

You’ve said they’re a big influence on Subatomic Particle Homesick Blues, but the counterpoint often smacks of old New Orleans jazz more than Bach.

Yeah, isn’t that funny? It just felt like so much fun to have the three horns going at it like that. The opening piece, “Evolution,” starts with that little hymn, but then where do you go? Did it need a B section? Instead I wrote out a roadmap: saxophone with rhythm, then a clarinet and trumpet duet, everybody plays together then the rhythm section drops out, whatever. Most of the actual content on that one was spontaneous, but “Asterisk” and “Possible” have composed counterpoint. That was the beginning of working with that for me. Now I’m committed to it. My earlier music was more like, play the melody and then blow.

“Who Died and Where I Moved To,” where you solo on contra alto clarinet, has a 1960s boogaloo beat.

I spent a lot of time listening to Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder” at an early age, mostly because of Joe Henderson. Things get in your mind at an early age, and are always sitting there.

Your arrangement of the country/folk tune “Satisfied Mind” sounds almost like a field holler; I don’t recognize the melody.

It’s a transcription of Bob Dylan’s version from Saved. For me, that period gets to the heart of Dylan; it’s so stark. Everything’s so heartfelt and full of yearning.

Did you know Joshua Redman when he was coming up in San Francisco?

No, we only met not long before we recorded. He’d gone to a concert I’d played on, and I heard later that he’d liked it, so I invited him to play a concert together. After that I said, let’s make a record, and he said yes. I met Devin Hoff and Ches Smith through pianist Graham Connah, playing in his sextet. He always had great rhythm sections — like Trevor Dunn and Kenny Wollesen who were in Junk Genius. Graham’s totally nuts, but his big band arrangements are unbelievably great.

Ron Miles I’d only met around 2007, the first time I heard him in person. He’s the world’s greatest melodist: When he plays a melody, it’s always perfect. I can’t get over it, or get enough of it. Sometime after we’d made that quintet record, I was set to record Go Home as a trio with Charlie Hunter and Scott Amendola in New York. When we found out Ron was going to be at the Village Vanguard with Bill Frisell that week, we asked him to join us.

Playing with Charlie Hunter made me confront deficiencies in my own playing I needed to work on. He has such a strong groove, especially when playing with Scott; they have a strong hookup. In my clarinet playing, I always wanted to cut across the groove, but in relation to it. I wasn’t sure how strong I was at holding up my own end of the groove itself.

Charlie and I were doing a clinic once, where he told all the guitarists in the room to put down the guitar for a year to play the drums. Then they’d understand the groove as the most important part of guitar playing. After that, I began practicing clarinet while playing drums with my feet. The idea being, the groove comes first. Then when I played clarinet on a gig, it would still be present.

I think of Subatomic Particle and Unfold Ordinary Mind as your before-and-after-Charlie records. On the first you’re in the front line, on the second you’ve switched over to the rhythm section, playing contra-alto clarinet.

That role is still pretty new to me. I knew I wanted to be the bass player in a band, but what did I know about that? I got the contra alto in 1997, and played it right after on one track from the album Twelve Minor, but then it sat in the closet for a long time. Later when I joined Tin Hat, they suggested I play bass on the contra-alto. It took awhile to gain facility on it, but then all of a sudden it opened up, and I fell in love with the sound. Between you and me, it looks hard, but it’s easy to play, the one I have at least.

It is kind of scary, situating myself in the rhythm section between Ches and Nels Cline, two very strong musicians. Now it was sink-or-swim time. When we recorded Unfold Ordinary Mind, we hadn’t played together before, and I wasn’t even sure we were making a record: Let’s just go into the studio and see what happens. Unexpected things started happening, like at the end of “xcpf,” where Nels goes into his looping thing, and Ches and I bring the groove in and out. That wasn’t planned.

Do you ever feel constrained, playing bass parts instead of soaring over the top on clarinet?

Not at all. It’s all I want to do now. Playing the same figure for seven minutes is a different kind of challenge: Am I nailing it, am I putting it in the right place, am I working with Ches? It’s a wonderful opportunity to do my best.

Certain ideas have become attached to improvised music that are a little oppressive: “Don’t ever repeat yourself, or be too melodic.” But think of Louis Armstrong and the old cats. Every time he improvises, he kills me. But he also kills me when he plays a melody he’s played a thousand times.

The quintet’s non-California ringer is New York tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin.

The first time I heard him play one note on record, I thought, “This is someone I have to get close to.” That one note contained everything: the most beautiful and ridiculous thing I ever heard. I think I wrote him a letter after that. We had done a few things over the years — a 1997 quartet record that never came out, and later some Go Home gigs where he replaced Ron. I could hear how Ellery and Rob Sudduth would fit together. They’re both strong and kinda ornery. I knew it wasn’t going to be like, “After you” — “No, after you.”

One more thing: It was only around the time we played some gigs in December that I made a connection to an unbelievably important record for me, Paul Motian’s The Story of Maryam. It has the same lineup but with a different bass instrument: two tenor saxophones sometimes playing at the same time, with guitar and drums. Maybe subconsciously I was moving toward completing a circle, returning to a record that was a model for how I wanted to play.

The early college tours that helped establish Brubeck’s classic quartet yielded numerous concert LPs — Jazz at Oberlin, Jazz at the College of the Pacific, Jazz Goes to College, Jazz Goes to Junior College. But the band also brought back memories of getting out there and back. Brubeck composed “Plain Song,” a highlight of the 1956 studio album Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A., on the road somewhere between Yankton, South Dakota and Iowa City; the repetitive alto melody and piano solo represent the rolling-in-place flat landscape, Norman Bates’s 2/4 bass thump and Joe Morello’s flicks of brushes on snare are the rhythm of bus tires rolling over concrete highway slabs. On the pastorale “Summer Song,” Brubeck’s piano intro sets up the hook, but then Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone runs with it, through one pretty, perfectly formed improvised chorus after another. There are urban numbers too — “Curtain Time,” “Sounds of the Loop” — but the breezy swing of the rustic stuff (including a horseback-loping “Ode to a Cowboy”) trumps the city-slick.

Much has been written about the creative contrast/tension between the urbane, unflappable Desmond and the easily excited pianist: one suave and poised, one jumping up and down on the piano bench. But Brubeck’s melodies gave the altoist plenty to dig into.

Once they expanded their territory beyond North America, the quartet brought back more than tricky rhythms like “Blue Rondo a la Turk”‘s 9/8. Like Duke Ellington, Brubeck made music based on his touristic impressions. The 1964 recording Jazz Impressions of Japan begins with “Tokyo Traffic,” written by Brubeck his first day in-country, a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of Hollywood Asianisms: Morello’s mock-kabuki woodblocks and ceremonial gong punctuate a melody drawn from a pentatonic scale. (Brubeck says their Tokyo audience got the joke: it’s a tourist snapshot of obvious scenery.) “Toki’s Theme” plays with Japanese hipsters’ embrace of modern rock. But Brubeck doesn’t neglect the contemplative mode, as composer or pianist. “Fujiyama” is one of his prettiest slow winding melodies, perfect for Desmond’s melancholy lyricism. (So is “Koto Song.”) The insistent bass figure underlining “Zen Is When,” left over from a 1960 session, curiously anticipates Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

The iconic album Take Five took off in the early ’60s, spawning four sequels (where, in truth, those 5/4, 7/4, 9/8 and 11/4 time-signatures can sound rounder, less painstakingly counted-out). By now the ¬¬quartet mostly recorded original material. A notable exception is Angel Eyes, recorded in 1962 and ’5, and devoted to Matt Dennis songs. The name may not ring a bell with devotees of the American popular songbook, but his tunes will. This batch includes “Angel Eyes,” weepers “Everything Happens to Me” and “The Night We Called It a Day,” and Von Freeman favorite “Violets for Your Furs.” The quartet’s “Let’s Get Away From It All” is speedier than Fats Waller’s ambling take, and the splashy rhythms of “Will You Still Be Mine” unleash the keyboard percussionist. This is the Brubeck who caught the young Cecil Taylor’s ear. (For what those pianists share, hear “Maori Blues” on Time Further Out.) The faster ones also bring out the rhythm player in Paul Desmond. He didn’t need fancy time signatures to superimpose his own shifty syncopated beats.

By the 1970s, the quartet was over, and the pianist often teamed with three of his sons as Two Generations of Brubeck. A new movement preoccupied with odd time signatures had arisen — jazz-rock fusion — and the second-wave Midwestern avant-garde was ascendant. There were half-hearted attempts of link Brubeck with either movement. Witness the Two Generations’ 1974 “Mr. Broadway,” an old 6/8 Brubeck TV theme reborn as fast jazz rock, with Dave and son Darius on dueling piano and electric piano and son Danny bashing like Billy Cobham at the traps. (Jerry Bergonzi’s on soprano sax.)

Four months later, for the album All the Things We Are with Roy Haynes on drums, Brubeck was joined by Chicago vanguardist (and great admirer) Anthony Braxton and/or cool contrapuntalist Lee Konitz on altos, meetings of historic more than musical interest. (Konitz is on “Like Someone in Love” and “Don’t Get Around Much,” Braxton on Dave’s signature ballad “In Your Own Sweet Way,” and both saxists on “All the Things You Are.”) More satisfying is a loose reunion with Paul Desmond, 1975: The Duets. Brubeck had calmed down considerably from his prime — he revives 1956′s “Summer Song” as a piano solo — and Desmond sounds ever more wistful, the alto’s Stan Getz.

The putdown “bombastic” plagued Brubeck for decades. There’s no denying he could go overboard, early — as on a long, live “At A Perfume Counter” from 1955. “Exuberant” is probably a better word for his youthful excesses at the ivories. The title of one late-period album, 2007′s solo Indian Summer, sets the tone: the warm side of autumn when days grow short. The pace is unhurried, the mood reflective, the selections a thematic blend of standards (“Indian Summer,” “September Song,” “Memories of You”) and originals — including one final “Summer Song,” harking back to the years when Brubeck was king of the road.

You can hear all that in his powerfully resourceful quartet with old ally Tim Berne on alto saxophone, Gerald Cleaver on drums, and the apparently limitless virtuoso Craig Taborn on piano. Their tough and tender fall 2012 release Small Places, with its aural de Chirico colonnades and Escher staircases, is their second for ECM, sequel to 2010′s acclaimed The Rub and Spare Change.

Starting in his teens in the 1970s and into the ’80s Formanek played straight-ahead jazz with the likes of Chet Baker, George Coleman and Freddie Hubbard before he got deep into New York’s downtown scene. He began stepping up as a leader with a pair of frisky/melodic/noisy quintet albums from the early ’90s, followed by two colorful septet dates studded with distinguished peers, among them Dave Douglas, Frank Lacy, Steve Swell, Marty Ehrlich and Marvin “Smitty” Smith.

eMusic’s Kevin Whitehead spoke with Formanek about his recordings as bandleader just before Thanksgiving, at his home outside Baltimore.

When we made this appointment you said something like, “I just had two gigs in a row where I had to play 4/4. Enough of that for awhile.” Isn’t walking the meat of jazz bass playing?

The meat and potatoes. I have nothing against walking bass, but I like it best when it feels like the right thing to do as opposed to the only thing – those Freddie Redd and Matt Wilson gigs were really fun to do. But now, I’m less likely to put myself in situations where I have to do that. The feel and emotion generated is what’s important; when the music wants forward motion and propulsion, there’s always more than one way to get it. Other instruments can carry that 4/4 feeling. Or you can play other kinds of phrases in that situation.

There are plenty of odd meters on Small Places, as on The Rub and Spare Change, but weird time signatures never sound like the whole point. For one thing, your slippery patterns aren’t easy to count out.

I may have gone as far in that direction as I can go, at this point. “Small Places” has one of the most complex rhythm cycles, but all those intricate metrical things, the fast odd subdivisions, relate in my mind to one long beat – a pattern that doesn’t always repeat perfectly. The beat is very precise at some times, less so at others – a very big groove you can relax with a bit, though one 9/32 bar threw rehearsals into chaos.

The layers of rhythm are like different size gears moving at different speeds. “Rising Tensions and Awesome Light” starts in 4/4, then goes to a very slow 5/2, with fast-moving eighth notes over the top. Gerald plays the eighth note rhythm on cymbals, but the real pulse is very slow.

I’ve used that idea a lot on the last few years – literally keeping two, or even three, rhythms going at the same time. In contemporary music, that’s not at all unusual. In jazz, it’s less common. But with improvisers, I like to set certain ideas in motion. It creates drama. Things can come completely unhinged, and then reassemble.

Do you worry about what you can play when you write it?

I don’t write it as if I’m the bass player. But I might dare to write things now I wouldn’t have five years ago. I write a little above what I know I can play.

On “Pong,” there are these leaping unison figures for bass and piano. As the bassist, you really have to nail those intervals to get that cavernous merged-timbre effect.

I like a big sound, and you get it with that doubling of parts. And since Craig can do that and one or two other things at the same time…

Was “Parting Ways” designed to bring out the 19th-century romantic in your piano player?

The thing about Craig is, he really knows all that music. You can prompt him in that direction in subtle ways. “Parting Ways” is the closest I ever came to trying to squeeze emotion into a piece of paper. There’s such a filtration process before the music gets written, but this time I tried to keep that emotional quality at the forefront. Even Tim – there’s a totally improvised moment where he sounds like Mahler.

For all Berne’s gifts as an improviser, he sounds great just playing a tune. He makes difficult lines sing.

He has stretched himself a lot. When we started playing together in the early ’90s, he hadn’t done much as a sideman, but he really opened himself up to that. He brings a lot to the table, and comes away with a lot. His melodic playing has become much more refined and confident. On “Soft Reality,” crying toward the end, his playing has an eastern double reed quality I hadn’t heard before.

Like you, Gerald Cleaver plays odd meters without being obvious about it. He may sound like he’s just playing free accents.

He is a master of that. Amazing. Aside from that, they’re all great improvisers. When we play together, the music always feels new and complex.

Jazz musicians have explored harmony and melody so much, but with rhythm there’s still a frontier there. The way complex meters are used now, the ease with which people can navigate them – it wasn’t always like that. Most odd-time playing before 1990 reminded me of a three-legged dog: like it was supposed to be in 4, but with a beat missing. I learned from a lot of drummer friends that those meters could be much rounder. Or look at Elliott Carter’s music.

I don’t think I ever used Carter’s metric modulations literally, but I’ve stolen rhythmic ideas from him. I’ll get a general idea of how something works – like Messiaen and his synthetic scales – without necessarily worrying about how the composer used them. The more I learn, the more I can incorporate into a personal system.

Did Tim Berne influence your long pieces that begin in one place and end in another?

I probably got that from listening to his music, even before making my first CD. I was looking for ways to make the music personal, and Joey Baron recommended I check him out. I liked the ways his pieces unfolded, and started working along those lines. Playing with him definitely reinforced that. The quartet Bloodcount must have played hundreds of gigs, at the Knitting Factory and on tour.

Bloodcount’s Berne, Jim Black and Chris Speed are on your ’96 recording Nature of the Beast, but the core band is two brass and two rhythm, with Dave Douglas, Steve Swell and Jim.

Before that album I’d made Low Profile [1993, for seven pieces] and really liked the sound when the ensemble broke down to just trumpet, trombone, bass and drums. The horns don’t fill up the overtones, like saxophones with their rich harmonics. It could all sound so clean and well-defined. So I started building some new music around that sound. Then I thought of adding Tony Malaby on tenor a little, and then Tim, and finally Chris’s clarinet at the last minute. (We’d been rehearsing for the date at Jim Black’s and heard him practicing upstairs. I did like the idea of having all the Bloodcount guys on it.)

With two brass and two rhythm, you get a certain kind of sonic thing; you can almost visualize the shapes. I was thinking about it architecturally.

Like the floor plan of a church.

Or the McDonald’s arches.

That was your last date as leader before The Rub and Spare Change 13 years later.

People have written that I didn’t do much after 2000, around when I started commuting to teach at Peabody in Baltimore. But I worked with pianist Dave Burrell a lot, and we made a good record, Momentum. I also made a whole bunch of SteepleChase CDs led by trumpeter Dave Ballou or pianist Harold Danko that I think are really good. And a bunch of stuff with pianist Jacob Anderskov.

Your first two early-’90s albums stand up very well, with catchy or dippy tunes like “Yahoo Justice” and “Coffee Time,” New Orleans funk and Braxtonian angularity, and that raucous quintet with alto sax, violin, electric guitar, bass and drums. At the same time, you were playing very refined jazz in Fred Hersch’s trio.

I wasn’t listening to Braxton, but Schnittke – probably not understanding it, but getting the idea.

Playing with Fred, I learned a lot about music and myself – learned I didn’t want to be in situations where I always had to be that careful. Sometimes I had to fight the Evil Mike from coming out. When that happened Fred would say, Mike is being Willful.

Tim Berne ended up in the quintet, but the altoist on your debut Wide Open Spaces is Greg Osby.

I liked him a lot from playing with him on Franco Ambrosetti’s Movies, Too. I was clueless about the M-BASE thing, but I had checked out his recordings. Basically that band was people I liked. Drummer Jeff Hirshfield and I had been working with Fred a lot, and we’d get together and workshop ideas. Guitarist Wayne Krantz is such a powerful rhythm player with a great sense of timing.

The combination could seem a little bizarre, but the front line of alto and Mark Feldman’s violin made perfect sense to me. I had been trying to learn about different kinds of music, scoring student films with small groups, and was getting into the habit of writing for strings. All those small pieces we played came from not knowing how to develop or end anything – the Monty Python problem.

When the band started getting gigs, Greg wasn’t always available. I used Marty Ehrlich and Andy Laster, who were great. But with Tim – he and Wayne hit it off, and with Feldman in there too, it unleashed the band’s comic side. We did a West Coast tour, and then the CD Extended Animation, three grueling days in the studio. I was trying to get everything perfect, but in the end the early takes were better.

I have to say I’m really proud of those records. There’s nothing I’d do differently. Had I tried to make records designed to be more “successful,” I doubt they’d have turned out so well.

Osby’s sound is well matched to yours, playing the melody in unison on “Cloak and Dagger,” and you have similar ways of approaching the chords from odd angles.

He does have that weird way through changes. We got to record again later with Gary Thomas.

The album Pariah’s Pariah from ’97, for two saxes and two rhythm. A nice example of the bass used as a percussion instrument.

I didn’t know John Arnold, who had a fusion kind of drum set, a sound I wasn’t used to hearing at that time. Maybe I was trying to impose…[shakes his head] I was being Willful.

Smart, inventive and heartfelt music

Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar’s 1963 classic Rayuela – in English, Hopscotch – is a fragmented tale of a Bohemian adrift on two continents. To underscore his hero’s dislocation and odd thought processes, Cortázar maps a zigzag alternative route through the book for adventurous readers. On their Rayuela, Puerto Rican alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón and French pianist Laurent Coq variously evoke the novel’s playfulness with language, mobile-like structure, transatlantic breadth and fascination with jazz, as well as the bittersweet nature of expatriate life. Ably abetted by instrument switchers Dana Leong on cello and trombone and Dan Weiss on drums and tabla, they make smart, inventive, heartfelt music.

Born in Copenhagen in 1936 to a Congolese father and Danish mom, Tchicai struggled with bebop’s demands as a young alto player. When free music hit around 1960, he heard greater opportunities for self-expression. In 1962 he moved to New York, and soon was in the thick of the scene, recording with tenor Albert Ayler on New York and Ear Control and with John Coltrane on his big-group blow-out Ascension. Tchicai co-founded the New York Contemporary Five, where he was sandwiched between bugling cornetist Don Cherry and tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, notorious for hogging solo space. (John also played on Shepp’s four-horn Four for Trane: rearranged Coltrane tunes.)

The altoist got more space in the New York Art Quartet, where – as on their 1964 debut – his thin tone contrasted with Roswell Rudd’s thicker trombone sound; that band also featured a new drummer with a dry, logrolling sound: Milford Graves. Tchicai’s sound is oddly cool, given free jazz’s usual heat. His long bent notes suggest Ornette Coleman’s influence, but where Ornette’s elasticity brings out his blues strain, Tchicai’s note-stretching sounds more like a straight taffy pull.

In hindsight, he sounds like he’s straining on alto, not least when competing with bigger horns. In the early ’80s Tchicai switched to tenor, and his sound became deeper, earthier and more confident: a new beginning.

But we get ahead of ourselves. In the mid ’60s he’d returned to Denmark, and began collaborating with other luminaries of the new European jazz – Holland’s Willem Breuker, Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink, Switzerland’s Irene Schweizer, fellow Dane Pierre Dørge – and with South African exiles like Johnny Dyani and Louis Moholo.

Later Tchicai made several weird, overlooked albums with pianist Kristian Blak, from Denmark’s far, far Faroe Islands. Blak’s music (as on 1982′s Ravnating with Tchicai on alto and soprano saxes and bass clarinet) is an unlikely amalgam of fake medievalism, early Keith Jarrett rolling and Canterbury rock, with some nature sounds thrown in. He and Tchicai were still at as late as 2000′s Anybody Home? under John’s name.

Tchicai’s tenor sounds great, voicing Curtis Clark’s catchy but curve-bally melodies on 1987′s Letter to South Africa, recorded in Amsterdam by an international quintet. As composer or pianist, Clark can be romantic but never sappy, and can go “outside” without forsaking lyricism, making him a good match for Tchicai, the lone wind player here. Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger alternates among sweet/sour/scratchy solos, frisky rhythm strumming, and syncing with Ernst Glerum’s bass. Moholo brings his South African swing to the drums.

John Tchicai spent much of the 1990s teaching at UC Davis, and recording with many younger American players on three coasts. His 1999 Infinitesimal Flash recalls his roiling ’60s New York bands; its sensibility reflects fellow tenor Francis Wong’s interest in traditional Chinese material as well as John’s own broad curiosity. His old slippery alto feeling returns on soprano sax, for the traditional “Autumn Moon.” There’s also a little spoken-word stuff, echoing Amiri Baraka’s recitation back on the first New York Art Quartet album.

Back in Europe, he made 2007′s Coltrane in Spring with three younger Danes: cornetist/pianist Jonas Müller, bassist Nikolaj Munch-Hansen and drummer Kresten Osgood. With its poetry recitation (the title track), one-world pentatonics and South African echoes (“Dashiki Man,” “Row Your Loveboat”), Ornetty/New York freebop (“Ude I Det Fri,” “Double Arc Jake”) and push-pull quartet dynamic (“On Top of Your Head”) it showcased John’s lyrical and blustery sides, and felt like a career summing-up.

In Holland, the soft-spoken Tchicai crossed paths with Sean Bergin, a volatile, cantankerous charmer in the Charles Mingus mode. Bergin was born in Durban in 1948 and settled in Amsterdam in the 1970s, where he too worked with Reijseger, Bennink and Mengelberg, and schooled younger players in workshops and weekly jam sessions. He stayed connected to South African roots, working with fellow exiles Moholo and bassist Harry Miller. Bergin may be best known Stateside for his go-for-broke alto and tenor playing on drummer Barry Altschul’s 1985 That’s Nice. But Sean’s greatest achievement was recorded two years later, the first and best album by his little big band the M.O.B. (My Own Band).

Kids Mysteries isn’t just one of the great documents of the amazingly fertile Amsterdam scene, it’s one of the great jazz records of the last 25 years, period, with an uncanny balance of loose feeling and precise execution. Bergin’s international tentet all but bursts out of the charts, yet the players are fully in tune in every sense: They nail the melody statements, delve deep into the written material in their solos, and never knock each other off balance for all the elbowing they do. Han Bennink’s whipcrack drumming snaps everybody’s rhythm into line.

Concertos for soloists include “Monkey Woman” for donkey-braying trombonist Wolter Wierbos and the penguin-sleek “Beach Balls” for clarinetist Michael Moore, but it’s all sterling. Sean’s orchestral writing can be knotty and clever, but there’s a strong whiff of South African streetcorner kwela in his catchy tunes; even the three-chord bassoon bassline to “Thoko’s Tune” will have you whistling. (The howling lead alto is Sean’s.) Kids Mysteries is a near-perfect masterwork.

Eventually critics began playing up the local color angle, likening the sounds of Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek or electric guitarist Terje Rypdal to echoes off a frozen fjord. I’m guilty too, and it was geological claptrap. Fjords are enormous: don’t freeze, don’t echo. That said, there was something to be said for regional identity. ECM’s stately spacious stillness can be found in embryo on Jan Johansson’s Jazz På Svenska, piano trio meditations on Swedish folk themes recorded in 1964. (Weirdly enough, American trumpeter Art Farmer’s To Sweden with Love beat Johansson to similar material by a week.)

There was another crucial aspect of the Garbarek-Rypdal Nordic sound: a barbaric Viking-horn side, rude blasts most effective when punctuating that stillness. But either player’s astringent timbre reflected more divergent influences. Some evidence can be found on three Garbarek ECMs — 1971′s Sart with Rypdal, and 1973′s Witchi-Tai-To and 1975′s Dansere both co-led by pianist Bobo Stenson — now collected in an anthology also known as Dansere.

Hearing Garbarek relatively early in his career, his non-local roots are easier to spot. You can hear a love of Albert Ayler in his low-register thrashing at the end of the tenor solo on “Song of Space.” Of course he also dug John Coltrane, and was hardly the only ’60s tenor to mash up those influences. On Carlos Puebla’s song for Ché, “Hasta Siempre,” the tenor’s torrid (as in non-icy) romantic rasp echoes another consolidator, Argentina’s Gato Barbieri, for years a frequent foil to honorary Scandinavian (and local hero) Don Cherry.

But in the midst of all that, Garbarek found the sound that became his signature: an arresting, quavering, nasal saxophone tone of his own. It’s not usual for tenor players with a big vibrant sound to get a more keening or pinched timbre on soprano, but Garbarek can get a remarkably similar sound out of either horn; compare his tenor on “Bris” with his soprano on Carla Bley’s tune “A.I.R.”

Those initials stand for “All India Radio,” drawing a connection between Garbarek’s tone and India’s double-reeds like the shehnai. (His later title Ragas and Sagas speaks for itself.) There may have been another, indirect prompt. Garbarek dug Keith Jarrett before he (and his bassist and drummer, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen) joined the pianist’s “European quartet” in 1974. He’d heard his “American quartet” counterpart Dewey Redman play double-reed Chinese musette, on which he got a similarly piercing western-eastern sound, as on Jarrett’s “Spirit” from 1971′s Birth.

Garbarek and pianist Stenson had close rapport, but nothing on their two albums together melds like the Garbarek-Rypdal unisons punctuating “Song of Space” — a nasty, nyah-nyah effect where vibrating reed and amplified strings sing as one. The guitarist’s sound was so arresting, ECM’s Manfred Eicher offered him his own recording date on the spot. It was the beginning of the label’s fascination with guitar eccentrics.

From Sart‘s wah-wah opening gesture, Rypdal brought a rockier sensibility to the ECM mix. His sustained saturated edge-of-feedback wail had some Hendrix in it, mixed with a jazz-guitar heavy attack, and his lines twisted like windblown trees. His axe sounded great, reverberating loudly into the quiet.

Terje Rypdal’s 1975 double LP Odyssey had been out in abbreviated form on a single CD. It’s now reissued intact, plus a 1976 broadcast with the same electric rhythm section and a 15-piece radio orchestra, as Odyssey In Studio & In Concert. Rypdal’s keening cries and dramatic silences are all over “Adagio” and “Fare Well,” and sound no worse for wear over funk beats and bass vamps on “Midnite” and the marathon “Rolling Stone.” The guitarist liked his electric Miles Davis. The newly-issued radio session isn’t so effectively stark, though it’s entertaining to hear an orchestral overlay on Milesian percolating boogaloo, on “Talking Back” and the electric-Gil-Evans-y “The Golden Eye.” (Like Garbarek, Rypdal had apprenticed with American composer George Russell, who liked his layers.) One thing some folks forget about the ECM sound: it can get pretty wild, Nordic or not.

The pianist also writes about jazz in a clear, accessible way from an insider’s perspective; his blog Do the Math, where he also writes on classical music and crime fiction, is essential reading for jazzhounds. This year he’s also appeared on drummer Billy Hart’s lively lovely All Our Reasons, to which Ethan contributed three tunes.

Iverson and this writer became friends when our New York years overlapped two decades ago, not least because of our shared love of 1980s jazz. Invited to talk to eMusic about five records important to him, he zeroed in on that decade, suggesting I pick a few mutual favorites to talk about, drawn from an annotated list of select period music he’d put together for Do the Math.

Anything to say about the ’80s to get started?

I graduated from high school in 1991, and did the bulk of my early record collecting before then, back in Wisconsin — before I was broke in New York and could barely afford any. I may have bought all the records we’re talking about here on LP. I love ’80s jazz. All three of us in the Bad Plus are deeply informed by it. Before I knew jazz history or read the books, this was some of the music I was most excited about. Song X meant more to me than Ornette Coleman’s Atlantic records, in terms of my own development.

Song X surprised some people, because Ornette’s co-leader was Pat Metheny.

Pat first reached people through melodic pop jazz, easy listening in a good way. It’s hard to write a melody the average biped wants to groove along with. (If you think it’s easy, try it.) But one thing that helped develop that talent was his immersion in Ornette Coleman’s music. Ornette’s alto melodies are touched by purest love, genius, logic, hummability: everything you want from a melody. “Kathelin Grey” and “Mob Job,” those tunes are incredibly beautiful.

Yet the music can be incredibly dense.

You’ve got to admire the balls of it. Ornette’s gift for melody is second to none, but he also likes to rub up against it, like when he busts out his noise violin on “Mob Job.” Denardo Coleman plays a lot of electronic percussion, which can sound dated today. But on the next Bad Plus record, Dave King plays some, specifically inspired by what Denardo does here. I also have to mention Charlie Haden, who hooks those alto melodies to his chorale-like bass accompaniment: truly exquisite. Metheny and Keith Jarrett both played a lot of Ornette-type music with Charlie. He’s a huge part of the puzzle, and probably doesn’t get the Elvin Jones-level credit he deserves.

Another of your heroes worked with Ornette: Dewey Redman, who played on your first album, School Work, in 1993.

Dewey’s always been one of the great tenor saxophonists for me. That 1989 review you wrote in Down Beat of a trio gig he played with Mark Helias and Ralph Peterson whet my appetite for moving to New York. I can always recognize Dewey from one or two notes. He’s a sly fox — doesn’t beat you over the head with that Texas tenor sound like, say, Fathead Newman; he gives you the impression he doesn’t want to reveal it all right away. The Struggle Continues is one of his best records. The presence of Ed Blackwell on drums is crucial. On “Turn Over, Baby,” they both play that old-time and maybe-future music.

That must be the most lowdown blues in the ECM catalog.

Dewey played the blues in Texas, and Blackwell toured with Ray Charles. They were professionals in that style. It’s the reason they’re so soulful. Pianist Charles Eubanks and bassist Mark Helias are also great musicians, from a generation of players not informed by the conservative movement in jazz in the 1980s. (Post-Wynton, things became…more reducible.) You can hear it in how they play Charlie Parker’s “Dewey Square” — there’s a different vibration. I’ve always loved Helias’s playing. A great composer, he’s interested in playing with swinging drummers, AACM avant-garde types, whoever.

Great bass players, that’s our segue to Ron Carter’s Etudes, also recorded in 1982, with trumpeter Art Farmer, saxophonist Bill Evans and Ron’s old ally Tony Williams on drums. You’ve said it might be Carter’s best record. It is awfully good, even with that rubber band-y amplified bass sound.

You’re not alone in not liking that. The two bassists where I never objected to that sound were Ron and Buster Williams. Something about their beat and feel lets me accept it. With rhythm as good as Ron’s, he could play a washtub bass.

I haven’t heard all his records, but Etudes is definitely a jazz classic: very original, very strong. The arrangements and interplay, the way Ron and Tony play together, with understanding and love — it’s a very sophisticated album. But the tunes Ron and Tony wrote are very singable. Sometimes, walking down the street, I’ll start singing one. The back story I heard is complicated: apparently Ron wrote the music for a gig with other players who couldn’t make the recording; Wayne Shorter sent Bill Evans as his sub. It was recorded very fast, like in an hour and a half, guerilla-style, the way Ron likes. Art Farmer sounds so great on this record. Maybe he should have recorded without piano more often.

And you’re a piano player! Which brings us to our first selection by a pianist, Andrew Hill’s Shades, for trio, sometimes adding Clifford Jordan on tenor.

I got it in high school, and remember thinking, “Man, this is great jazz!”

You’ve said it’s “possibly Hill’s most conservative album.”

What do you say?

It’s certainly his most Monkish, with “Monk’s Glimpse,” his gloss on Monk’s version of “This Old Man” and Monk’s old drummer Ben Riley. Clifford Jordan reminds me of Charlie Rouse with Monk here. Every note he plays is fat and emphatic, and very precisely placed, really defining Andrew’s elusive melodies. There are some fine ones here.

That about sums it up. With Clifford or Rouse, you hear him play just a few notes, you know he’s the genuine article. No academy, no Real Book, no meta — it is what it is. Clifford heard it all as a continuum, could also play modal jazz, or free. He and Andrew come fromChicago, and knew the city’s experimental stuff, as well as blues and ballads.

Did Hill influence you as a pianist?

I hope so! A great influence: a very pure spirit, taking the road less traveled. Some players never stop inspiring you. I didn’t really know him, but met him enough to know his gracefulness, warmth, and determination to make strange music.

Which brings us to pianist Don Pullen’s New Beginnings [available as the last six track on disc two of his Capitol Vaults Jazz Series set], with Tony Williams and bassist Gary Peacock.

A great record! I’m not a Pullen expert, but to me, this is the one. As with Etudes and Shades, the compositions are so important. Don obviously has a lot of respect for melody; it’s almost like an Ahmad Jamal record in that way.

“Jana’s Delight” is very catchy, and there’s that great flamenco tune, “At the Café Centrale.”

Also that free-time “Reap the Whirlwind,” this clear avant-garde statement in the context of a melodic record: one tune where he lets the dogs out.

Andrew Hill gets his due these days, while Pullen seems less well-remembered than he should be. He had his own advanced techniques, like rolling his right hand up the keys, but some folks thought he just sounded like Cecil Taylor.

If you play atonal glisses and play a certain high number of notes per second, inevitably there will be some similarities. Cecil Taylor is incredible, an important part of the jazz tradition, but there are no pretty tunes on any Cecil record I ever heard. Pullen was always playing the blues, while Cecil is off in outer space.

Did Pullen influence your playing?

I’d like to go back and be more influenced by him.

The pianist is well deployed on several albums Motian recorded there, notably the first and last of the lot, Live at the Village Vanguard Vol. 1 and On Broadway Vol. 5. Both feature dual saxophones (Greg Osby and Chris Potter on the former; Loren Stillman and Michael Attias on the latter), plenty of Kikuchi’s gloriously obtuse backing for soloists, and one of composer Motian’s classic earworms, “Morrock.” The latter also has an unforgettable, oozing version of the standard “Midnight Sun.”

But the best place to hear how simpatico the pianist and drummer became is Kikuchi’s bizarrely gorgeous new Sunrise on ECM, recorded in 2009. Other drummers create a world of polyrhythms on the kit. Motian might drag a wire brush two inches across a snare drum head, yielding a short quiet rustle that has to bear a lot of weight, like a single brushstroke on a spare canvas. He was a minimalist, reducing drumming to a suggestion. Flash was the farthest thing from his mind.

The pianist, same deal. A couple of notes here and there may be enough to establish a mood, and sense of space: his playing can be as spare as ambient Eno for airports. You can hear as much on the opening “Ballad #1,” Sunrise in microcosm. Bassist Thomas Morgan, another Motian favorite, will insert his bass notes into the piano line, in effect merging their voices, more than he lays down traditional support. Kikuchi’s piano sonorities can be pristinely beautiful, but then he’ll wander off track, let his harmony slide out of shape like a cake left out in the rain.

And then there’s his let’s-call-it singing. Other pianists groan along with their right hands, but Kikuchi takes it to another level. His wizened voice descends on the music like a cosmic haze. It’s too weirdly eerie to dislike.

Odd to think of a longtime downtown Manhattanite as an outsider jazz artist, but Kikuchi can come on like a man from Mars, making up his own impression of musical syntax. When he tells a New York Times writer, “I don’t have any technique,” you see what he’s getting at: He’s an anti-virtuoso, like Motian. Kikuchi just wants to play free, his mind clear of preconceptions; Sunrise is all improvised. Not that that’s always easy to clear the mind; on “Short Stuff” he appears to slide into Gil Evans’s blues-riffing “LaNevada.”

He had to unlearn a lot to get where he is now. When Masabumi “Poo” Kikuchi first came up inJapanin the 1950s, he reportedly sounded like Thelonious Monk, that anti-virtuoso with odd ways of backing a soloist. But by now the resemblance is mostly conceptual.

He sounded relatively normal by the time saxophonist and flutist Sadao Watanabe made 1967′s Jazz Samba, rolling with the chord changes on “It Might As Well Be Spring.” But there are glimmers of the pianist’s later style, as on the street march “Frevo,” where he choose sing-song notes with laggard care, tugging against an irresistible beat. “Surf Board” finds him madly clonking chords and obsessing over an against-the-grain two-note volley for eight bars — a ploy so weird he quickly brings it back. (There’s more early Kikuchi on a similarly samba-heavy two alto meet from the following month, Charlie Mariano & Sadao Watanabe.)

In the early 1970s, the pianist moved toNew York, recording with an Elvin Jones trio and (later) as one of multiple keyboardists in Gil Evans’s roiling electrified big band. While still in Japan, Kikuchi had recorded with ex-Albert Ayler, ex-Bill Evans, pre-Keith Jarrett bassist Gary Peacock. In the early 1990s they formed the co-op trio Tethered Moon with a drummer Peacock went way back with, Paul Motian. That was the beginning of a beautiful partnership.

The trio’s first session included Monk’s “Misterioso,” to remind us what inspired Kikuchi’s gap-toothed phrasing and start-stop motion, and how much he’s remade them in his own terms. Of the several Tethered Moon albums, this listener’s partial to the 2004 release Experiencing Tosca where, sometimes anyway, the trio jump off from shards of Puccini arias. “Part I” shows off the pianist’s chord clanging, sounding less like Monk than slowed-down Cecil Taylor. On “Part II” Kikuchi and Motian hone in on their minimalist concepts, though both would prune back more radically by the time they made Sunrise. (“Blues for Tosca” starts with something very like an actual drum solo.) Kikuchi’s growling reaches fever pitch on “Part III,” but his vocalizing’s not exactly operatic.

Throughout, Gary Peacock’s virtuoso bass playing is a lyrical marvel; he counterbalances his abstract colleagues, where Thomas Morgan meets them on their own ground. Not that you’d ever think of Tethered Moon as a conventional trio — except compared to the one on Sunrise.

Those last items referenced are in the second, winter 2012 batch of 2-in-1′s, containing one bona fide essential — twinned Charles Mingus 11-tet classics from 1963 that ably juggle his gospel, Ellington and jump-blues strains — and more notable releases than we have room to discuss.

Coltrane admired his fellow fast, interval-minded, tough-sounding tenor saxophonist John Gilmore, who rarely recorded outside Sun Ra’s orbit. But Gilmore did a few ringer sessions in the ’60s, starting with 1962′s The Artistry of Freddie Hubbard where the saxophonist holds his own in fast Jazz Messenger-ish company including trombonist Curtis Fuller and pianist Tommy Flanagan. Hubbard was then Art Blakey’s trumpet star, and his crackle, attitude and manly swagger raise the bar for his mates. That session’s paired with Freddie’s Body and Soul, for which Wayne Shorter arranged extra horns and occasional strings. Eric Dolphy’s flute is uncharacteristically out of tune in a couple of spots, but he makes up for it with the skittering alto solo kicking off “Clarence’s Place.”

The circle of players Coltrane brought to Impulse included altoist Marion Brown, who’d played on Ascension. Subsequently, Brown recorded for ESP, and moved to Paris for a spell where he fell in with the great drummer Steve McCall, a linchpin of Chicago’s genre-trampling AACM collective. The AACM influence is strong on Brown’s Geechee Recollections & Sweet Earth Flying from 1973 and ’74, with their declaimed texts (including Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer’s story “Karintha,” complete), African percussion and impressions thereof, and respect for the uses of quiet open spaces and judiciously applied electronics. McCall’s on both albums, alongside Chicago colleague Wadada Leo Smith on trumpet for Geechee; on the latter session, AACM honcho Muhal Richard Abrams plays piano, electric piano and organ — usually alongside Paul Bley sharing the same battery of keyboards. Brown was a friend of Ornette Coleman, but his alto (and soprano) sound is grainier, less whooping if just as blues-saturated.

In the mid ’70s, Impulse was also home to pianist Keith Jarrett’s “American quartet” — his old trio with plush-sounding bassist Charlie Haden and tasty drummer Paul Motian, plus throaty Texas tenor saxist and musette squawker Dewey Redman, like Haden an Ornette vet. The Jarrett’s quartet recorded two LPs for Impulse, Mysteries & Shades, in three days late in 1975. (Actually it’s a quintet here, with Guilherme Franco’s rustling percussion at the fringes.) Pianist Ethan Iverson told Jarrett, “My generation of musicians regard it as one of the greatest bands in history,” and the quartet’s rolling momentum with little overt swing — try “Southern Smiles” — has been hugely influential on many later piano combos including Brad Mehldau’s, and Jarrett’s own replacement “European quartet.” Dewey shouting through his horn while improvising, as on “Diatribe,” was one of the most arresting sounds in jazz back then.

As noted above, Impulse put out some frivolous records, too. Arranger and composer Oliver Nelson recorded one of the label’s early classics, Blues and the Abstract Truth. Subsequently he moved toHollywood, where scoring TV action shows left little time for jazz projects. Some of his later sessions could get a little lightweight, not always in a bad way. The disc billed to Oliver Nelson & Friends conjoins late-’60s sessions by pianists Hank Jones and TV fixture Steve Allen; each of them also plays a fair amount of electric harpsichord, an axe then in momentary vogue. The ensemble voicings are often rich and lively. Jones gets tangled up in baroque counterpoint on “Fugue Tune”; Clark Terry drops by to sing the faddish “Winchester Cathedral” a la Satchmo. Allen’s pop covers include Mr. Redding’s “Dock of the Bay” and the Lemon Pipers’ “Green Tambourine.” It’s adorably silly, a little like the hinky music Hollywood composers had coming out of teenagers’ radios in ’60s movies.

We could go on: about ’60s Clark Terry dates, one where he’s flanked by Phil Woods and Ben Webster, one where he hooks his trumpet up to the electronic Varitone, and does some sketch comedy; about Sonny Stitt, fronting a Hank Jones trio on two sessions, and sparring on one with Ellington’s star tenor Paul Gonsalves; about Alice Coltrane, swirling like a dervish on harp, and bringing a North Indian sense of ornamentation to electric organ. If consumers bite, this series could go on a while.

Rivers made his name in the ’60s as one of the Blue Note label’s lefties: not quite avant-garde, but leaning. He could split the difference: on “Mellifluous Cacophony” from Contours, bristling horns on the head giving way to swinging Herbie Hancock and Freddie Hubbard spots. Rivers had the passion. On 1964′s Miles in Tokyo – warming the quintet’s tenor chair till Wayne Shorter arrived – he goes for it like a man with nothing to lose, fiery but sure of his technique. He harrumphed at modal players who didn’t stick to their declared modes. “Dizzy said I was the only musician he knew who played every chord, playing standard music,” Rivers told me (among others). “I thought that was the idea!”

In the 1970s, his music split into two streams: limber, free-wheeling improvising combos and densely-layered big groups. Those vectors began diverging on 1967′s Dimensions & Extensions, for midsize four-horn sextet. Wind/bass/drum improvisations are augmented by three lyrical winds swelling up in the backgrounds, to bolster the action, flesh out the harmonies, and goose a soloist. It’s his big band method in embryo.

You can glimpse the development of his large ensembles on 1974′s expansive Crystals, 1981′s Colours (11 winds, all charts/no solos) and 1998′s star-studded Inspiration and Culmination, by which his concept’s fully developed. Dissonantly voiced zigzag horn lines soar over one-chord funk: a meeting of high and low any way you mean it. That formula propelled the Rivbea Orchestra he regularly led after moving to Orlando in 1992. You’ll have to look offsite for the Florida edition’s indie Aurora and 3-CD Mosaic set Trilogy (for which I wrote the notes).

Dimensions & Extensions was demonstrably ahead of its time; it went unreleased till the mid-’70s. That was the decade of Rivers’s highest profile, mostly owing to spirited trios that showed how hard free play could swing. His most celebrated unit had precise propulsive bassist Dave Holland and pushing, sometimes coloristic drummer Barry Altschul, who’d been working with reedist/flutist Anthony Braxton. Holland’s quartet album Conference of the Birds, a ’70s classic, brought all four together; the program’s energized by the contrast between Braxton’s angularity and Rivers’s sinewy, serpentine approach.

Rivers, Hollandand Altschul improvised whole sets without any predetermined material, but familiar patterns emerged. Bass and drums set up vamps and grooves under various axes Sam played in turn, including his throaty tenor and dry, leafy flute. (He’d whoop a bit, too.) His spackle-piano, informed by Cecil Taylor’s spiky dissonance, could turn touchingly lyrical. Rivers had played soprano sax before tenor, and made far more than his peers out of that horn’s slippery snakecharmer side. The trio’s music had wonderful flow – it’s free but really moves. The Quest from 1976 is a snapshot of their interaction; the wild-card Rendez-Vous addsItaly’s madcap romantic Mario Schiano on alto, performing his beloved “Lover Man.”

Another classic Rivers trio had nimble tuba player Joe Daley and any of several drummers; Black Africa with Sid Smart at the traps (and pianist Don Pullen sitting in for a spell) is part of Atomic Records’ welcome excavation of Italy’s elusive Horo catalog. Then, taking a cue from Conference of the Birds, Rivers brought Holland and Daley together to crisscross the bass register on 1978′s fast-moving Waves, alongside new star trombonist George Lewis and drummer Thurman Barker. Again, the method is open and the flow magnificent.

Other ’70s trios are up on the overlapping Hues, a compendium of bite-size concert excerpts, and the longer-form Sam Rivers Trio Live: with Altschul and Cecil McBee or Arild Andersen on bass; with McBee and drummer Norman Connors; with bassist Richard Davis and Warren Smith on drums. There are melodic and explosive moments all over. For the latter, check out the closing minutes of “Suite for Molde” (part two) on Trio Live, where a squealing soprano and bowed bass merge. (To untangle the particulars, visit Rick Lopez’s awesomely detailed Rivers website.)

After moving to Florida, Sam Rivers led his longest-lasting trio, with Doug Mathews on bass, electric bass and bass clarinet, and Anthony Cole on drums, tenor sax and piano. All their instruments and his own four gave the band dozens of timbral combinations to work with; sometimes they morph into a wind trio on Celebration, recorded live just after Sam’s 80th birthday in 2003. In a way, that unit reunited his twin paths: a free-wheeling trio with multiple voices to orchestrate.

Rivers had been a reliable sideman in the ’60s – on Blue Note with Tony Williams, Andrew Hill, Grant Green, Larry Young, Bobby Hutcherson – and now younger players tapped him to spark or burnish their records. Sam’s dark but mobile tenor adds instant gravitas wherever it appears on pianist Jason Moran’s 2001′s Black Stars. (He also plays flute, soprano and even piano, kicking off “Sound It Out.”) Brassman Steve Bernstein fronted Rivers’s Florida trio on Diaspora Blues, ditto trumpeter Brian Groder on his Torque, just as trombonist David Manson had absorbed them into his swingy quintet Fluid Motion .

Other sessions were looser. Rivers on his three horns improvised the CD Vista in California with drummer Harris Eisenstadt and percussionist Adam Rudolph. And in 2004, drummer Kresten Osgood and bassist Ben Street brought Sam north to record the loose trio performances (including a few standards) heard on the rough and ready Violet Violets and Purple Violets, the latter with vibist Bryan Carrott on four numbers. It was as if Street and Osgood sought to revive Sam’s ’70s trio magic, and who could blame them?

Jazz loves its own roots, and sporadic brawls between so-called traditional and avant-garde camps are often just disagreements about which fabled past is to be fondly referenced, in the course of finding one’s own sound. Consciously or not, anachronisms always creep in, so the music always reflects its own time, one way or another.

In the 1980s, the young lions paid tribute to the hard bop era, circa 1955-65, the age of the great jazz rhythm sections. The lions swung like crazy, while still updating their concepts all kinds of ways – even Wynton Marsalis’s changing-meter tumbles on 1985′s Black Codes owed something to fusion, music from an era he mostly abhorred, the 1970s, when his patron Art Blakey had some lean years.

In jazz, the 1970s was an age of resourceful solo pianists (Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Andrew Hill, Cecil Taylor), rocky and funky rhythm sections and pop-inspired melodies (jazz-rock fusion, CTI albums), and Anthony Braxton’s rhythmically convoluted wide-leaping lines. The decade’s reputation has only lately been rehabilitated, just in time for its echoes to ring out all over.

One of the year’s astonishments, Craig Taborn’s Avenging Angel, reminds us why solo piano recitals are so fascinating, as a test of pianists’ resources, their abilities to investigate that big box of wires and hear what it can do. Taborn’s sound is sometimes breathtakingly spare, sometimes a polyrhythmic churn, and his frame of reference can take in Milhaud, Monk and Bach in 30 seconds (on “Neverland”). With Avenging Angel he’s not just a Musicians’ Unwittingly Well-Kept Secret any longer. And there’s more from that session in the can.

More ’70s echoes: Jarrett’s solo effort Rio, where shorter pieces let the pianist, who demands perfect quiet when he plays, feed off an audience’s response for once. Chick Corea recorded two-piano duets with Stefano Bollani, as he did with Herbie Hancock in the ’70s. (And Corea’s Return to Forever reunions? Seventies!) Vibist Gary Burton exceptionally vibrant New Quartet’s Common Ground is energized by hot young guitarist Julian Lage, latest in a line of Burton pickers including Larry Coryell and Pat Metheny.

The compositions on Tyshawn Sorey’s Oblique – I picked up on Braxtonian angularity, but Sorey is a heavy drummer who also brings ferocious swing to the material. That’s how it goes in jazz; rhythmic tacks that may sound awkward at first – like 5/4 meters or jazz reggae – get smoother over time.

The arena-rockification of ’70s fusion drumming was generally not a positive direction, but soon limber jazz drummers like Dennis Chambers or Joey Baron (or Jim Black, later) sounded at least as comfy with a rockin’/boogiein’ 8th note feel as a swingin’ 4/4. Nowadays more and more jazz musicians take rock and funk beats for granted; The Bad Plus pointed the way for a lot of bands.

For a state-of-the-era progress report there’s James Farm, from the co-op of the same name, where saxophonist Joshua Redman gets to plant himself in front of a fireworksy trio and blow. Drummer Eric Harland and bassist Matt Penland’s combinations on “Coax” recall Keith Moon and John Entwistle. Pianist Aaron Parks often sidesteps conventional strategies, but his harmonic/rhythmic buoyancy has its Jarretty side. Moments on “Polliwog” eerily evoke Keith’s 70s quartet with Josh’s dad Dewey Redman on tenor.

Now, any jamoke can cherry-pick some of the year’s notable albums to float a trend story, and remaining ’70s haters shouldn’t lose hope. The great tradition of noble and solid swingers is always alive and well. Trumpeter Terell Stafford’s This Side of Strayhorn, mostly tunes by the other half of Duke Ellington’s brain, Billy S, both stands on its own and calls back to forebear Art Farmer’s 1987 Something to Live For with four of the same tunes.

Of course some folks are always working to put it all together. On Ambrose Akinmusire’s fine 2011 release When the Heart Emerges Glistening, there’s classic jazz balladry (an old school “What’s New”), catchy tunes he rides like pop choruses, an elegy for Oakland shooting victim Oscar Grant, and times when his trumpet sounds like a ritual ram’s horn. Akinmusire harnesses control and unpredictability both, and he’s but one member of a tough cohesive band; the swinging rocking Justin Brown’s booming bass drum adds a whiff of hip-hop. It’s Akinmusire’s second album, but feels like a major debut.

In reality, those were all always the same guy.

As early as the 1982 recordings for his debut on ECM, In Line – solos, overdubbed solos and duets with bassist Arild Andersen – there was this odd whiff of country music in his improvising. His most imitated stuff – the volume-pedaled notes swelling up from silence, his whammy-bar bent tones and his slow drowsy vibrato – conjured pedal steel guitar, not his hero Jim Hall.

Makes some kind of sense: Country radio was ambient sound when Frisell was growing up in Colorado. He also loved wide-open spaces; loved the pure sound of a long note hanging in the air. (That made him a good for reverb-friendly ECM.) But he was steeped in jazz, mindful of how pianist Thelonious Monk could milk a few stark notes, forcefully applied at precisely the right moment.

Caribbean calypso was an odder influence, but then Sonny Rollins is another idol. In 1981, Frisell recorded Paul Motian’s island-riddim’d “Mandeville” with the drummer’s excellent quintet of up-and-comers. That band got whittled down to a trio with tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, one of the great working jazz groups for 25 years: slippery, confident, traditional and open.

The countryish echoes seemed more deliberate in Frisell’s classic quartet with cellist Hank Roberts, bassist/bass guitarist Kermit Driscoll and drummer Joey Baron. The strings blend beautifully, but the harmonies always sound a little bit off, in a good way: pianist Bill Evans’s sublime chords with bent strings. On the quartet’s debut Lookout for Hope made in 1987, even Monk’s “Hackensack” has a porchy string band feel.

“Little Brother Bobby” is part waltz, and partly in two-beat rhythm that somehow sounds like country & reggae. On their exit album Where in the World? four years later, the long surprise coda to “Child at Heart” salutes drummer Sandy Nelson, early-’60s rock-instrumental god. This band’s a blender: Kermit bumps on electric bass under cello and jangly acoustic (“Smilin’ Jones”). Bill also had his noise thing. He works well with gadgets, especially little delay units: he loops and punches in phrases pulled from his improvising, with perfect timing (Lookout‘s “The Animal Race”).

The ’80s was Frisell’s New York/downtown period. As someone who could sound like himself in all manner of settings, he was perfect for John Zorn’s stylistic mashups, in the thrash-meets-Mancini band Naked City, and on Zorn’s grand pomo projects like Spillane. Frisell, Driscoll and Baron also did rollicking rockabilly-ish scores to Buster Keaton’s silent comedies Go West, The High Sign and One Week. The anachronistic music was oddly perfect for technically innovative films set at the fringes of civilization.

Have a Little Faith, recorded in ’92, celebrated the eclecticism. In a bold sweep, Frisell covered John Hiatt, Madonna, Sonny Rollins, Dylan, Muddy Waters and John Philip Sousa – but also Stephen Foster, Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, three very different American pictorialists. The gem was a reduction of Copland’s ballet suite Billy the Kid, for the Keaton trio plus go-to accordion guy Guy Klucevsek and clarinetist Don Byron, who never sounds better than alongside Frisell. Copland brings out the guitarist’s playfulness and love of melody, his own tendency to reimagine the sound of the plains.

The follow-up This Land – featuring a sextet with three winds including Byron – showed how diverse influences played out in Frisell’s own pieces. “Jimmy Carter (part 2)” sounds like a sailor’s hornpipe arranged by Copland. “Amarillo, Barbados” is country & calypso, enlivened by Curtis Fowlkes’s Skatalites trombone and a hook that holds up to endless repeats. (Frisell heeds Monk’s advice: Always keep the melody going some kind of way.) The album’s also a showcase for the precise, concentrated drum power of funky swingy tight Joey Baron, as on the action short “Unscientific Americans.”

In 1995, Frisell finally embraced his inner ‘billy and began recording in Nashville. He bonded with bassist Viktor Krauss and steel guitarist Greg Leisz in particular. Later improviser/fiddler/violinist Jenny Scheinman with her high lonesome sound became a regular ally on the woodsy stuff.

Frisell has recorded a lot of open-sounding, slightly cracked rural music since. I’m most partial to the 2008′s Disfarmer, with the three players just named, and the cream of 2011′s Sign of Life, for his 858 Quartet with Scheinman, Hank Roberts on cello and violist Eyvind Kang. The pieces written during a Vermont retreat are suitably pastoral and timeless, music for passing the pumpkin pie around, and playing cards in the parlor later.

But that string quartet can get rowdy too. They first convened to play Richter 858, composed/improvised reactions to Gerhard Richter’s abstract canvases with their disruptive surfaces: one layer of paint partly scraped away to reveal the pigments below. The music has that same kind of toughness and textural depth, splash and color and idiosyncrasy.

One idea Frisell often returns to: how seemingly antithetical styles like blues and country have the same roots. Go far enough back, everyone’s drinking from the same fountain: Jimmie Rodgers mashed up blues, country, jazz and Hawaiian on “Blue Yodel No. 4.” Frisell’s unstated corollary: diverse styles can be reconnected, not by invoking old licks, but by starting over.

The pioneering jazz musicians grabbed ideas from anywhere; that’s why early jazz is full of classical motifs, tap-dance rhythms and Sousa-band strategies. Frisell’s like that – draws on the full range of stuff that reaches his ears.

Golson’s melodies sound good on their own, and have a way of slyly drawing improvisers in. His tunes have such strong shapes, soloists need only hint at their contours to sound focused on the material, and his catchy motifs lend themselves to impromptu development. “Whisper Not” is built on a pair of notes, the first short and low, the second longer and higher: a simple contrast played out in different ways in every phrase of the song. It’s easy for a soloist to run with that. Golson’s a composer who thinks like an improviser, and a superlative tenor saxophonist with a composer’s knack for tying together rhythmically supple phrases.

He grew up alongside chum John Coltrane in Philadelphia, and has some of the same speed, exploring the nooks of passing chords. But Golson had the warmer, furrier tone, and was more drawn to tuneful melody. You can hear what he owes tenor patriarch Coleman Hawkins. The unaccompanied “You’re My Thrill” on Golson’s Take a Number from 1 to 10 nods to Hawk’s solo classic “Picasso.”

In the late 1950s, Golson wrote for and recorded with trumpet phenom Lee Morgan, Dizzy Gillespie’s big band and octet, and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. He began making his own solid records in 1957, off to a running start with the hot/cool quintet/nonet Benny Golson’s New York Scene.

But he really clicked after teaming up with tartly suave trumpeter and peerless balladeer Art Farmer in the three-horn sextet the Jazztet, one of the great hard bop bands formed in the 1950s. Blakey’s Jazz Messengers was a battering ram, and Max Roach’s groups played intricate games with time. By comparison the Jazztet was less showy, but lighter in tone and on its feet. For a quick intro hear the “Five Spot After Dark,” named for the Bowery hangout where the Jazztet split bills with Ornette Coleman in 1959. Tommy Williams’s limber bass dominates the introductory blues choruses – a quietly offbeat touch – and the riffy tune itself is an earworm. The effortlessly swinging rhythm trio is anchored by ever-alert Philly drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath, and you can hear what effective foils the lyrical Farmer and Golson were. The trumpeter had his mellow sound yet piercing attack, offsetting the tenor’s smoother lines and timbral depths.

The Jazztet’s six early-’60s albums are on The Complete Argo Mercury Sessions, along with three sessions by each co-leader from the same period (including Golson’s fine Free, Turning Point and Take a Number…). (It’s one of a few downloadable sets that reprise the contents of out-of-print boxes from the esteemed jazz reissue house Mosaic.) Most of these albums are separately available; for a quicker intro try Meet the Jazztet (with Curtis Fuller on trombone and newcomer McCoy Tyner on piano) or the sequel Big City Sounds, with “Five Spot After Dark” and Cedar Walton at the keys.

They were awfully good, but it was hard keeping such in-demand players together. Parting was amicable, allowing Farmer and Golson to reconvene with trombonist Fuller in the 1980s, yielding five more Jazztet albums with the same spirit but no stale mothball aroma, like Moment to Moment (where Tootie Heath used a phone book for a snare drum, Benny says) and Back to the City and Real Time, live in New York and sparked by the subtle and powerful drummer Marvin “Smitty” Smith. Golson had no problems working with young lions like Smitty; they’d grown up playing his tunes.

Golson got his 15 minutes of non-jazz fame, playing himself – as a target of ardent autograph hound Tom Hanks – in Spielberg’s 2004 The Terminal. Golson’s barely in it, but he’s the MacGuffin who sets the plot in motion. The tie-in album is Terminal 1, with a couple of Golson standards (“Blues March,” “Killer Joe”), Eddie Henderson sizzling on Harmon-muted trumpet, and Carl Allen on drums. That album’s quintet plus trombonist Steve Davis became Golson’s latest three-horn sextet on New Time, New ‘Tet four years later. He didn’t sound at all like he was pushing 80.

The Jazztet feeling has always stayed with him, but Golson’s no stranger to offbeat settings. Take a Number from 1 to 10 from 1961 was a gimmick album with a purpose, starting with solo tenor and adding one instrument per track, a clever way to explore multiple textures on one record. The skeletal early tracks give his commanding horn plenty of exposure.

And then there’s ’67′s Tune In… Turn On to the Hippest Commercials of the Sixties – back when jingles were apt to be jazzy or bossa nova-y to start with. There’s some trendy electric harpsichord (as on “Music to Watch Girls By,” where Golson channels Stan Getz), and wordless ooh-bah-bah singers; on “Wink” and “Happiness Is,” Benny’s tries out the newfangled Varitone electric saxophone, walking in Eddie Harris’s shoes. It’s all absurdly entertaining.