Pianist Keith Jarrett found fame early in life, initially with Charles Lloyd in the mid-60s. When this concert was taped at the NDR Funkhaus in Hamburg on 14th June 1972, his trio with bass player Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian had existed for six years, recorded three albums for Atlantic Records, and was already at a creative peak. Jarrett was still only 27 years old. After a hint of “When You Wish upon a Star” during a lyrical, unaccompanied opening, the piano coalesces with splashing cymbals and Rainbow (which is credited to Jarrett’s then-wife, Margot) becomes a lightly swinging and relatively mainstream affair. Haden is only briefly heard, and – until Jarrett’s luminous eruptions at the end of the piece – we only get a taste of the riches in store. The next four selections are by Jarrett. Everything That Lives Laments is notable partly because – in addition to piano - Jarrett plays (frequently over-blown) flute, and Motian shakes bells and chimes. Haden is highlighted before retreating into a group improvisation that is clearly more than a random free-for-all; these men know each other well and really communicate. The tune ends tenderly, with Jarrett back on piano and Motian at the drums. Piece for Ornette bursts with energy and evokes Coleman’s urgent, piano-less style. Jarrett uses soprano saxophone with a raw, vocalised timbre. Chattering, shrieking and stuttering with wayward abandon, his dialogue with a highly-charged Motian builds in intensity and becomes a thrilling, passionate exchange. Eventually, Haden steps between them, as if he’s engaging calmness and reason to break up a screaming row. After this, it’s hard to imagine that Jarrett – in little over a decade – would be leading a very different trio with a repertoire concentrating on old jazz standards. read more: http://news360.com/digestarticle/zY-Z3JVmkk-ommq2Cl7fGg
I grew up listening to a lot of music that Paul was a part of. Obviously Bill Evans’ music, and a lot of things with Mose Allison. I was just hip to him from my dad’s record collection. In the early ’70s I went to Berklee after high school, and saw the Keith Jarrett Quartet at the Jazz Workshop. For me, that was the next quartet after the Coltrane Quartet, as far as the creativity and the spirit of the music. So I strived to play with those guys, and I joined Paul around 1981.
Paul was the type of cat who embraced the people he played with. All the bands that he played with, he turned them into really creative collective ensembles, and from the earliest recordings of Bill Evans we could hear that. But if you look at his discography, during the same period he was playing with Lennie Tristano, Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz as well as Mose Allison and Bill Evans’ trio. And then he played with Albert Ayler in the ’60s and was still doing things with Jarrett. And then Arlo Guthrie. Paul lived a beautiful experience in the world of music.
As a composer he developed like that as well. That’s why his music was really folklike and he created vehicles to improvise. He didn’t write pieces of music that you just played and then repeated; he wrote pieces of music that were springboards.
He had this beautiful way of playing from the first beat of a tune to the last beat with total communication. So he didn’t just play at the same time you played; it was a breathing thing, with a lot of space. You had to stand on your own two feet to play with Paul. And he didn’t rehearse, either. He would expect people to be hip to the music. We would play, Bill and Paul and I, at my loft, and they weren’t really rehearsals; we would just play together.
Playing with Paul might have been difficult for certain kinds of players who wanted a drummer to just play the beat. But Paul could read that, too. If he played with Al Cohn or Zoot Sims, he gave them what they wanted, because he was a mature player and he had fun. He was also a hard-swinging drummer; he was a song player, he was a form player and a musician who played the inner structures of the tunes so beautifully. Paul developed within his relationships with folks in the jazz community, throughout his whole life, and he never lost that development and that drive. But the roots of his playing were from Baby Dodds and Papa Jo.
He had a lot of different sides to his character. He was a sweet, incredible, humble guy. He also had a lot of energy and was serious and had a strong attitude about things, and carried himself amazingly on the road. To survive like that on the road you have to be really strong; you have to be loose and fierce at the same time. It was like the way he played.
Paul Motian, a drummer, bandleader, composer and one of the most influential jazz musicians of the last 50 years, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 80.
The cause was complications of myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood and bone-marrow disorder, said his niece, Cindy McGuirl.
Mr. Motian was a link to groups of the past that influenced what jazz sounds like today. He had been in the pianist Bill Evans' great trio of the late 1950s and early 1960s and in Keith Jarrett's so-called American quartet during the 1970s. But it was in the second half of his life that Mr. Motian found himself as a composer and bandleader, with work that could be counterintuitive or straightforward, runic or crowd-pleasing.
Stylish and alert - he wore sunglasses in the dark and laughed often and loudly - he worked steadily for decades, and for the last six years or so almost entirely in Manhattan. He had the support of the record producers Stefan Winter and Manfred Eicher, who released his music on the labels Winter & Winter and ECM, and of Lorraine Gordon, the proprietor and presiding spirit of the Village Vanguard, who booked him many times a year, either in his own groups or those of others. (In his 70s he grew tired of traveling, and anyway, he said, he preferred the sound of his drum kit at the Vanguard.)
The many musicians he played with regularly included the saxophonist Joe Lovano and the guitarist Bill Frisell, with whom he had a working trio; the pianist Masabumi Kikuchi; the saxophonists Greg Osby, Chris Potter and Mark Turner, with whom he played in trios and quartets; the members of the Electric Bebop Band, with multiple electric guitars, which in 2006 became the Paul Motian Band; and dozens of others, from developing players to old masters.
For nearly all of his bands, his repertory was a combination of terse and mysterious originals he composed at the piano, American-songbook standards and music from the bebop tradition of his youth by the likes of Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus.
Stephen Paul Motian (he pronounced his surname, which was Armenian, like the word "motion") was born in Philadelphia on March 25, 1931, and reared in Providence, R.I. In 1950 he entered the Navy. After briefly attending its music school in Washington, he sailed around the Mediterranean until 1953, when he was stationed in Brooklyn. He was discharged a year later.
He met Mr. Evans in 1955, and by the end of the decade he was working in a trio with him and the bassist Scott LaFaro. That group, in which the bass and drums interacted with the piano as equals, continues to serve as an important source of modern piano-trio jazz.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Mr. Motian played with many other bandleaders, including Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, Mose Allison, Tony Scott, Stan Getz, Johnny Griffin and, for a week, Mr. Monk.
After leaving his partnership with Mr. Evans, he worked steadily with the pianist Paul Bley, whom he often credited with opening him up to greater possibilities.
"All of a sudden there was no restrictions, not even any form," he told the writer and drummer Chuck Braman in 1996. "It was completely free, almost chaotic."
In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Bley recalled: "We shared the same philosophy, musically. He knew that what he was doing in the past was not his answer. What he lived for was growth and change."
Then, and even more with Mr. Jarrett's quartet in the 1970s, Mr. Motian moved away from swing-based rhythm; he improvised freely, or played off melodic form. Eager to grow beyond percussion, he studied and composed on a piano he had bought from Mr. Jarrett, and in 1973 he made a record of his own compositions for ECM, "Conception Vessel," with Mr. Jarrett and others. One of the last records he made with Mr. Jarrett's quartet, "Byablue" (1977), consisted mostly of Mr. Motian originals.
But the old sense of swing never left, and it later became abundantly clear again, whether he was playing an original sketch built on uneven phrasing with gaps of silence or a root text of jazz like "Body and Soul." Sometimes he would strip a beat to absolute basics, the sound of brushes on a dark-toned ride cymbal and the abrupt thump of his low-tuned kick drum.
Generally, a listener could locate the form, even when Mr. Motian didn't state it explicitly.
"With Paul, there was always that ground rhythm, that ancient jazz beat lurking in the background," said the pianist Ethan Iverson, one of the younger bandleaders who played with and learned from him toward the end.
Mr. Motian's final week at the Vanguard was with Mr. Osby and Mr. Kikuchi, in September. "He was an economist: every note and phrase and utterance counted," Mr. Osby said on Tuesday. "There was nothing disposable." He is survived by his sister, Sarah McGuirl.
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