Fred Kaplan

Henry Threadgill won the Pulitzer Prize this year for his 2015 album, In for a Penny, In for a Pound, but his latest album, Old Locks and Irregular Verbs (just out this month on the Pi Recordings label), is better still. It's his true career milestone, one of the great jazz compositions of the past several years, a musical masterpiece beyond category.

Herbie Hancock's 1965 quintet album Maiden Voyage holds a firm place as one of the great jazz records of that transformative decade, and a new vinyl edition on Music Matters Jazz—the LA-based house renowned for its audiophile LP reissues of Blue Note titles, and only Blue Note titles—sounds finer than it has on any pressing in 50 years.

A quick, final word on Fred Hersch’s week of piano duets at the Jazz Standard. His early set last night with Jason Moran was one of the most enthralling concerts I’ve seen in a long time. At its peak moments (and there were several of them), the two settled into such a head-spinning groove, they sounded like one pianist playing magically with four hands. Moran, as I’ve noted in an earlier entry, may be the jazz pianist of our times, the supreme post-modernist who appropriates everything around him—musical traditions from Schumann and Jelly Roll Morton to Afrika Bambaata and Jaki Byard, as well as random sounds from movies, streets, and Chinese stock-market reports. Hersch matched his intervals, leap for leap. It’s been well over a decade since Hersch could be tagged a merely “lyrical” pianist in, say, the vein of Bill Evans, but even so, it was a jolt to see him tackle a frantic tune like Mingus’ “Jump Monk” (a natural Moran pick) with such finely disciplined abandon. It was an equal delight to watch Moran delve into the rhythmic crevices of an old-hat standard like “If I Had You” with such swaying jigsaw strokes.

A powerhouse trio is playing at the Village Vanguard through Sunday—Ethan Iverson on piano, Charlie Haden on bass, Paul Motian on drums. I saw them last night, and if you’re a jazz fan who lives in the Tri-State area, you need to go see them, too. Haden, who made his mark 50 years ago in Ornette Coleman’s original quartet, remains one of the supplest and most instinctively musical bassists around. He knows just when to hit the fundamental of a chord, when to spell out the arpeggio, when to walk the scale, or when simply to evoke the mood of a song. The last time I saw him, playing duets at the Blue Note in August, he’d recently had a hernia operation, and while the notes he played were spot-on, in their customary surprising ways, he couldn’t play very many of them; I wondered, in this blog, if age (he was 70) might finally be taking a toll. Last night proved he’s fully recovered and plucking full-throttled. Motian, who has played off and on with Haden since the early ‘70s (he was also the drummer in Bill Evans’ 1961 trio that played at the Vanguard on Waltz for Debby), is, to put it plainly, a magician. Nearly each bar, he attacks his drumkit, usually with brushes, in a completely different way (the Motian Variations, you might call them), sometimes in a way that seems at odds with what his bandmates are doing (double-time is one thing, but is there such a thing as one-and-a-half time?), yet it all merges and converges perfectly. Iverson is best known as the pianist for The Bad Plus. I like that group a lot, but he goes leagues beyond on his own, excavating hidden patterns, rhythms and motifs from jazz standards, while preserving their lyricism or blues or swing. The set I saw, the trio played mainly ballads and blues, including Bill Evans’ “Blue in Green,” Haden’s “Silence,” and a couple Charlie Parker tunes, which generally aren’t up Haden’s or Motian’s alley but they swung hard and clear and just a bit intricately off the beaten track.