Stereophile: Iverson-Haden-Motian

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.

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