If you can’t make it to New York, a vast assortment of Leonard’s work is for sale at A Gallery for Fine Photography in New Orleans (maybe the best private gallery of its kind in the country). He’s also published a book of his photos, which are reproduced in exceptional quality.

Lucifer is the latest album featuring Bar Kokhba, Zorn’s Masada string sextet (a breathtakingly tight ensemble: Mark Feldman, violin; Erik Friedlander, cello; Marc Ribot, guitar; Greg Cohen, bass; Joey Baron, drums; Cyro Baptista, percussion), this time playing a slew of new Masada songs. Zorn started writing Masada music in the early ‘90s: initially 100 compositions (200 more in the years since), jazz heads, each written in one of the two “Jewish scales”—a major scale with the 2nd note flat or a minor scale with the 4th note sharp. Zorn wrote the tunes without specifying instruments. The first Masada band, and still the classic one, was a pianoless jazz quartet (Zorn, alto sax; Dave Douglas, trumpet; Cohen, bass; Baron, drums). But the string groups, which Zorn conducts, unveiled the harmonic colors. All their albums are beauts, and Lucifer may be the most satisfying: like a breezy drive along the Amalfi coast, with hairspin curves, taken at full speed, hard traction, and cool aplomb. You can dance to it, in your head and on the floor.

The Dreamers is silkier still. It features members of the Electric Masada band (Zorn, Ribot, and Bapista, plus Jamie Saft, keyboards; Kenny Wollesen, vibes; and Trevor Dunn, bass), but the music isn’t Masada; it’s more a mix of ska, Hawaiian wah-wah, blues, New Wave movie-scores, and howling rock and roll. It’s not the slightest bit camp. (Nothing of Zorn’s is.) These guys are into this deep, and they take you in with them.

The sound quality is superb, especially Lucifer, which is engineered by Jim Anderson, who has been sorely missed from jazz recordings since he ducked into academia a half-decade or so ago.

But now comes redeeming news. Two weeks ago, on March 26, the jazz critic Gary Giddins interviewed Rollins in a packed auditorium at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. In the course of the evening, Giddins revealed that Rollins has been listening to reels and reels of his concert tapes—collected over the past couple decades by a obsessive fan in Connecticut named Carl Smith—and that he has picked what he regards as the best tracks from a dozen or so of those concerts to release on a two-CD set sometime next year.

As every Rollins fan knows, the gap between his live concerts and his studio sessions has always been staggeringly vast, especially since the 1970s but even before then. (To my mind, his most thrilling albums have always been the live ones: A Night at the Village Vanguard, Our Man in Jazz, G-Man.) And as we also know, he is his own harshest critic, often dismayingly so (as with his decision not to release the Carnegie Hall concert). During the CUNY interview, Giddins played an excerpt of one of Rollins’ great solos from an album of the 1950s. The audience applauded. Rollins said, “Well, I’m glad you liked it. I found it excruciating.” Later, Giddins played a much longer tape—one that nobody has heard. It was from a concert in Kansas City in the 1980s, a jaw-dropping stream-of-consciousness solo that would have James Joyce gasping for breath. Rollins was fidgeting throughout, and afterward said, shaking his head, “I can do better than that.”

The point is that if Rollins approves of these tracks (when Giddins asked playfully if he liked them, he replied, “They're passable”), then this is destined to be one of the greatest albums of all time. Not all the selections have been finalized, and probably won’t be till later this year at the earliest. But make a note, and watch for it.

Unprepared improv can be thrilling, as long as the musicians go into it with a common conception, a talent for clairvoyance, and a commitment to keep the music moving forward. (Think Ornette Coleman’s ensembles, Miles Davis’ mid-‘60s quintet, or Konitz’s own trio with Elvin Jones on the great 1961 album, Motion.) None of these traits were on display at the Jazz Standard during the set I happened in on.

Maybe it was just a bad set. Konitz seemed aware that things had gone badly. After the maddening first medley, he sort of chuckled, muttered, “I’ve got to get out of here,” and pretended to walk off stage. Nate Chinen, the New York Times’ astute jazz critic, saw the late set on Tuesday and gave it a rave review, calling it “an astonishment of collective attention and unmannered epiphany.” It’s often a gamble with Konitz. This time, I drew a bum hand.

At 78, Coleman has scarcely changed in the 50 years that he’s been on the jazz scene—except, perhaps, that his tone has mellowed; there’s a burnished lyricism to his ballads and a burrowed depth to his blues. He played tunes old and new, frenzied and meditative. All were models of economy, grace, and Cubist swing. Classical influences were on keener display: not only “Sleep Talking” (from his Pulitzer Prize-winning album, Sound Grammar), which is built on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, but also an improvisation on a Bach cello suite. Both sent chills; neither had a trace of “jazzing the classics” gimmickry.

The ensemble was a bit different from the last time I saw Coleman play, in 2006 at Carnegie Hall. His son, Denardo, is still on drums, Tony Falanga on upright bass, and Al McDowell on electric bass guitar. But Greg Cohen, who was a second acoustic bassist (he’d pluck while Falanga bowed), is gone; and McDowell, who before seemed a third pedal, has now found his place. He mainly strummed his instrument, the way most guitarists play a six-stringer, combining notes into chords—not as a harmonic foundation (which Coleman’s music doesn’t require) but rather as chromatic enrichment. It adds a steely edge to the fast tunes and a bright glow to the slow ones.

Falanga, it turns out, didn’t need Cohen; he can do the bowing and the plucking by himself. (Cohen is a terrific musician, but, in retrospect, two may have been a crowd; the basslines at Town Hall sounded clearer, more urgent.) Denardo, meanwhile, keeps growing as a drummer: he pounds out alternate rhythms with daring wit, rides his cymbal with an intense rush, and spans the dynamic range with a fine control. (Not long ago, he was too loud; now he can toss bombs yet stay in the background.)

But Ornette remains the leader and guide of this musical adventure. No one this side of Charlie Parker has eked such drenching yet unsentimental passion from an alto saxophone. He blows notes and intervals that constantly surprise (they often break all the rules) yet seem absolutely natural, even inevitable, as they cascade and roll in like waves.

Coleman is not merely among the last survivors of the post-Parker revolution in musical affairs (along with Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz, Paul Bley, Paul Motian, Roy Haynes, and Charlie Haden, himself the last surviving cohort of Ornette’s breakthrough quartet of 1958-60). He was also, along with John Coltrane, the progenitor of that revolution. And yet his music sounds as fresh as tomorrow, and he remains, to put it plainly, the greatest living alto saxophonist. There are more technically accomplished horn players, but few—perhaps none—match his unvarnished intensity, his mesmeric levitation of melodic lines, his instinctive immersion in the blues. He is known as the father of “free jazz”—a style of music that broke through the constraints of chord-changes—but the term is misleading. As many who have tried to emulate him learn, freedom doesn’t mean chaos; Ornette Coleman’s free jazz demands tremendous discipline, because it demands all of the alluring traits of great jazz—beauty, grace, wit, and verve—without the rules that help most musicians get there. It’s tightrope- walking not only without the net but, seemingly, without the rope.

Ornette Coleman is 77. He walks slowly and talks meekly; he is not as strong as he once was. Yet, judging from the last two times I’ve seen him play in New York (both times at Carnegie Hall), his tone is more gorgeous than ever, his mastery of the elements every bit as assured. His band—Greg Cohen and Tony Falanga on bass (Cohen plucking, Falanga strumming) and his son Denardo Coleman on drums—is as tight and hair-raising as any he’s led since his classic quartet of (can it be?) 50 years ago. Who can say how much longer he can keep this up? Go see him now.

(In an Oct. 2006 issue of Slate, I wrote a deeper analysis of Coleman’s music, especially of his latest CD, Sound Grammar, replete with 30-second sound clips illustrating my points. You can read it by clicking on the “external link” below.)

The concert with Haynes and McBride, last Sept. 18, was sensational, a revelation even by Rollins standards. (I reviewed the concert for the New York Times and, in longer form, on this blog.)

But now, I have learned that there will be no CD. Rollins, who is nothing if not self-critical, is displeased with the quality of his playing and therefore wants to keep the tapes bottled up. A true shame.

I interviewed Mr. Rollins recently, about another matter entirely, and asked him if he at least planned to perform again with McBride and Haynes (the latter, a contemporary with whom he hadn’t played since 1958!). He replied that a reunion is in the works. If that concert really does happen, book planes, trains, or buses to see and hear it.

This is rather understated music. Kolker’s sound is reminiscent of Lee Konitz. It’s a bit “light;” you hear the air fluttering against the reed before it whooshes through the horn and comes out golden from the bell. The melodies are fairly simple, but they weave a jangly path; you have to follow them closely, like the curves on a slow drive along the Amalfi coast. Motian takes these lines and gives them edge and adventure without jarring the scenery. He dangles new rhythms on the hi-hat, adds new beats with the snare. Listen to “In or Out,” a basic blues, except that Motian slides on the cymbal at the end of a bar, extending the phrase, throwing the whole passage into suspense, then casually resolves it in a flash. John Hebert, who used to play bass for Andrew Hill and thus knows about messing with space and time, plays tag team with Motian, multiplying the possibilities. Abercrombie often plays the anchoring role that a bass usually holds down, strumming in unison or in counterpart, adding a twangy texture of mystery.

The sound quality, by engineer Jon Rosenberg, is superb. The first track begins with Kolker blowing solo; you think he’s with you in the room. When the other players come in, the illusion is snapped only slightly, but you still feel he’s taking you to their room.

This is high-energy music, not quite as stormy as his live recordings in the mid-‘60s with a quartet that included the shamefully underrated Joe Farrell on tenor sax—Live! and The Last from Lennie’s (those albums make you sweat!)—but close enough. The sound quality is good, not great, but the music transports you with its wit, blues, and zest.

Now I’m feeling guilty. So, to compensate for my diversion from the stated mission of this blog, I will also plug Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, a sprawling tour de force about the great (mainly classical) composers of the past 100 years—a collage of biography, political history, cultural analysis, and musicology—that ranks not only as 2007’s best book about music but as one of that year’s best books, period.

It was a brilliant album that didn’t receive the accolades it deserved. (I put it on my 10-best list that year, but I can’t think of any other critics who did.) Listening to the two albums back to back raised a larger point—which is that the lines and barriers between “pop music” and “art music” are breaking down, and, for the most part, this is to the good. Those who maligned jazz-rock “fusion” in the late ‘60s and ‘70s did so, in the main, with good reason; but the drek was drek not because it was fusion but because it was bad fusion—because it combined the least imaginative elements of both genres of music. Jazz has always been a hybrid art. From the beginning, it fused African rhythms and European harmonies. Jellyroll Morton spoke of “the Latin tinge.” Songs that we now regard as “jazz standards”—“Body and Soul,” “Embraceable You,” “My Funny Valentine,” and so forth—started out as the pop tunes (mainly Broadway show tunes) of their day. Yes, it was a dreadful thing to hear a monstrosity like Sarah Vaughan Sings the Beatles or Duke Ellington doing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” But those were cases of dreadful mismatches, not evidence against the case for crossing breeds.

We have Herbie Hancock feting Joni Mitchell in River: The Joni Letters (Mitchell’s own jazz-inflected excursions of the ‘70s, Mingus and The Hissing of the Summer Lawns, deserve a fresh re-hearing); Dave Douglas playing Mary J. Blige and Rufus Wainwright; Cassandra Wilson singing “The Wichita Lineman;” Jason Moran incorporating hip-hop, gospel, the cadences of Turkish phone conversations (as well as Monk, standards, Chopin ballads, and every other thing he wraps his mind around); and on the list could go.

The best of these latter-day fusions combine the most imaginative qualities of the music’s various elements—complexity, soul, wit, and swing—and the distinctive flavorings of the artist at the helm. (Listen in particular to Mehldau’s take on “Martha My Dear;” he turns it into a Bach fugue while staying true to the song’s essence.) More than this, the best fusions exude authenticity. Young musicians like Mehldau and Moran grew up listening to rock and hip-hop, as well as to Schubert and Monk. They’re not pandering when they dip into more popular genres. The Bad Plus isn’t winking and nudging when they cover Bjork or Nirvana. This is their music; and by melding it with jazz, they’re being true to the jazz tradition.

There are still those—a smart critic like Stanley Crouch among them—who argue that jazz is music in the African-American tradition and that music derived from other lineages isn’t really jazz. I’m more in tune—and so is much of the creative jazz of our time—with John Zorn, who, when I interviewed him for a New Yorker profile nine years ago, noted that Tower Records (and now, he would add, the Internet) gives us access to music from all over the world. Why shouldn’t modern music absorb and reflect the world in which it breathes?

I’ve been listening to Kimbrough for 20 years now, ever since he was a protégé of Shirley Horn, up through his years as co-director (with bassist Ben Allison) of the Jazz Composers Collective, his longtime stint in Maria Schneider’s Jazz Orchestra, and his occasional projects with Joe Locke, Paul Bley, and Paul Motian. But I have never heard him play with such freedom, virtuosity, and gorgeous lyricism—all at once—as on these sessions.

Listen especially to “Quickening,” an original piece that’s reminiscent of Monk with a dash of Tatum and Waller. Kimbrough plays so much—and takes such different paths—with each of his hands, that I could have sworn I heard overdubbing. (He assures me there was none.) But pyrotechnics have never impressed me for their own sake (for instance, with due respect for the dead, I was never a fan of Oscar Peterson, except as a singer’s accompanist). What’s impressive about Kimbrough is that he can do all this while keeping the pulse ticking and the head swaying. He also does a slow, bluesy cover of Motian’s “It Should’ve Happened a Long Time Ago,” a knotty spin with a dirge on Monk’s “Coming on the Hudson,” and a jolting excursion through Ellington’s rarely heard “Wig Wise,” among others.

The sound quality is warm and percussive. Buy this.

Throughout the set (a mix of Monk, standards, and originals), Motian would be bashing with brushes, swirling with sticks, coaxing rhythms, sub-rhythms, beats that are out of rhythm, klook-a-mop tempos that seem to have no connection with what Moran and Potter are doing—and yet it all melds perfectly. Your foot’s tapping, your head’s bobbing, your alpha waves are cruising, the music is tight, loose, inside, outside, mellow, intense, all at once—what’s happening here? My friend, the pianist Frank Kimbrough, was in the audience. Frank is an astute musical analyst as well as a terrific musician; he played with Motian two years ago on an excellent trio album (called Play). I asked Frank if he understood how Motian does it, and, somewhat to my relief, he shook his head, no less awed and puzzled. “It’s magic,” he said. “I think he listens so hard, and he has such a complete grasp of his instrument, that whatever he does, it turns out right.”

Of course, Motian needs top-notch sidemen to do what he does at full throttle, players who know to keep going and how to keep up, and at the 9 pm set Thursday, Moran and Potter were in superb form. Potter occasionally looked dazed after a solo, as if he were thinking, “How did I do that, and how much longer can I keep this up?” This is the most inventive trio I’ve seen in a while, certainly the most equilateral in its triangulation. I hope they play together often and record an album very soon.

That said, the rollout leaves me lukewarm. The first two albums are Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ Big Beat and Horace Parlan’s Speakin’ My Piece. The sound quality is sensational, especially the Parlan—as vivid, dynamic, and in-the-room lifelike as any Blue Note I’ve heard. The music, though—the music isn’t stellar. It’s good, very good. If you wanted to play someone an example of “the Blue Note sound,” you might put on one of these records. But that’s the problem: it’s generic, formulaic; there’s nothing distinctive about it. I’m glad that the company delved a bit deeply into the catalogue, that they resisted the temptation to put out the overly familiar. (How many more audiophile pressings of Coltrane’s Blue Train do we need?) But Big Beat is far from Blakey’s best album; it’s not even among the best albums of that version of the Jazz Messengers (the one with Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons, and Jymie Merritt); those would be A Night in Tunisia, Moanin’, and At the Jazz Corner of the World. And Horace Parlan—he’s elegant, soulful, woefully neglected, but there’s nothing essential here.

In a brochure inside the gatefold, Music Matters’ proprietors—who include Joe Harley, Ron Rambach, and ace mastering engineers Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray—list 61 other titles that they plan to release in the next two years. (Good luck on that!) The ones I’m most looking forward to—the ones that have the “Blue Note sound” but something else, something original and distinctive, beyond that—are Sonny Rollins’ A Night at the Village Vanguard, Sonny Clark’s Cool Struttin’ and Sonny’s Crib, Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch, Wayne Shorter’s Juju, Jackie McLean’s Swing, Swang, Swingin’ and Let Freedom Ring, Freddie Redd’s Shades of Red!, Clifford Brown’s Memorial Album, Kenny Dorham’s ‘Round About Midnight at the Café Bohemia, Freddie Hubbard’s Open Sesame, and Dexter Gordon’s A Swingin’ Affair.

These double-disc 45s go for fifty bucks per title. I also see that Chad Kassem’s Analogue Productions is going to be putting out a series of Blue Note 45s, as a follow-up to his Fantasy 45 series (which just finished the last of its 100-title run). If you want to buy them all, for the sound and the collector’s value (these are limited-editions), go ahead. Otherwise, save up and get them not just for the demo value but also for what matters most: the music.

Pianist: Jason Moran; Keith Jarrett.
Bassist: Charlie Haden; Greg Cohen.
Alto saxophonist: Ornette Coleman; Lee Konitz.
Tenor saxophonist: Sonny Rollins; David Murray.
Trumpeter: Dave Douglas; (too hard to name a runner-up).
Clarinet: Don Byron; Anat Cohen.
Violin: Mark Feldman; Jenny Scheinman.
Guitar: Bill Frisell; Marc Ribot.
Drummer: Roy Haynes; Jack DeJohnette.

That’s all for this year!