Fred Kaplan

All this week, the Jazz Standard in New York will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Jazz Composers Collective, the brainchild of five musicians who formed five distinct bands: the personnel would remain the same, but each player would lead his own band and compose all of its music. Both concepts were unusual at the time: the continuity of players and the insistence on original compositions. Back then, jazz musicians rotated in and out of bands, not the other way around; and the emphasis was on covering standards or blowing improvisations.

One drawback of the New York-centric jazz world (and I say this as a New Yorker) is that musicians who live elsewhere too often go ignored. Oral histories are full of tales about some tenor saxophonist in Mississippi, or a guitarist in Nevada, who influenced someone who influenced everyone else. And so you should definitely check out the Denver trumpeter Ron Miles’ riveting new CD, Quiver (on the Enja label).

Ravi Coltrane's quartet is at the Village Vanguard this week, and that in itself is a marker of how confident—ballsy wouldn't be a stretch—this musician has become in recent years. It's bold enough for John Coltrane's son to take up the tenor saxophone as a trade. It takes the next level of audacity to lead a band at the club where Dad laid down maybe the greatest live jazz recording ever. But the ultimate display of self-assurance from Coltrane fils came during his improv on an original tune, "Thirteenth Floor," when he casually quoted a few lines from "A Love Supreme."

The guitarist John Abercrombie's latest, Within a Song (on ECM) is something of a high-wire act: delicate music of an uninsistent intensity, a quiet swing, that hangs together or collapses on the ensemble's sustenance of balance. The musicians here—Joe Lovano on tenor sax, Drew Gress on bass, Joey Baron on drums—are masters at this sort of thing (and many other things too), and so it's a riveting album. Even when they coast, swish, and twirl along the slightest thread, you're carried along (or I was anyway).