Music Review

(excerpted from the NYT):

On Monday the JVC Jazz Festival honored Ms. Gordon, the Vanguard's 83-year-old proprietor, with a full menu of bands at Carnegie Hall that she books regularly at her club.

Multiple bills in the JVC festival can come off a bit gingerly or as overthought, programmed to avoid alienating the presumed micro-audience for each band. And in truth, a mismatched double bill can feel like a non sequitur. But a wild garden of five is much better than an awkward pairing of two.

This one had Dr. Michael White's Original Liberty Jazz Band, from New Orleans; Paul Motian's Trio 2000 + 1 ; Roy Hargrove's Quintet, with the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson as a guest sixth member; the Bad Plus; and finally the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. Stylistically, it was all over the place. So what; nobody minded. The idea that it was designed by the filter of Ms. Gordon's ears — she is a sharp and judicious listener — helped to make it cohere conceptually without wilting. There were very few walkouts until nearly 11 o'clock, when the show was coming to a close.

Mr. Motian's trio sounded minimal, slow, undefined by era. The band — Larry Grenadier on bass, Chris Potter on tenor saxophone — played two of Mr. Motian's knotty melodies that sound as if they can be played at any speed and in any rhythm, then was joined by the singer Rebecca Martin for three standards.

They were "Everything Happens to Me," "The Folks Who Live on the Hill" and "You're Getting to Be a Habit With Me." All began with the songs' often neglected opening verses, sung against Mr. Motian's and Mr. Grenadier's airy improvising, before the rhythm solidified and Mr. Potter came in; this band allows everyone to solo more or less continuously, although there are proper solo choruses as well.

But Ms. Martin's voice, easy and forthright and happily unconcerned with evoking the phrasing and rhythmic nuances of old jazz singers everyone knows, relaxed the pulse, and Mr. Potter's solos accelerated from logical, melody-based structures into a controlled language of overtones and shrieks. (An exquisite new record of this band, "Paul Motian on Broadway Vol. 4, or the Paradox of Continuity," on Winter & Winter, is due Aug. 9. Write it down.)