The Return of the Paul Motian Trio

by Tom Chandler

It was a wintry night in Boston the last time I saw the Paul Motian trio. At the time I went because of Bill Frisell, having no real idea who Motian was, much less Joe Lovano. That was probably fifteen years ago, and I still remember the experience, although I couldn’t tell you for sure what club it was. It was a tremendous concert, full of the kind of improvisational empathy and in/out lyricism that Motian has been championing since the late 50s. Frisell hadn’t yet gone off into Americana-land, and Lovano was just at the beginning of a string of Blue Note albums that would do their best to make him a household name.

Since that time, the trio has released a slew of CDs, first on JMT and then on Winter and Winter, none of them really easily findable. They were all out of print for a few years until last year Winter and Winter put the JMTs out again, making Live in Tokyo and Trioism available again. When Live in Tokyo first came out, my girlfriend at the time derided it as “having no melody”, and when Trioism came out, my future wife gave it to me as a present, which is a gesture of blind love if there is one, because I’m pretty sure she thought it had no melody either.

After that I stopped paying much attention, because the Live at the Village Vanguard disc kind of left me cold. Maybe if the three guys ever did a tour together I would have kept involved, but if they ever play, it must be in NY. I can count on one hand the number of times Motian has made it the Bay Area in the last ten years. Maybe he just doesn’t like it here. Maybe the weather is too mild, or the hippies get him down. Frisell and Lovano haven’t been strangers, but the closest they got to the trio was at the Monterey jazz fest a few years ago.

Frisell’s output as a solo artist has been consistently engaging, and Motian has made a number of consistently wonderful discs as a team with Gary Peacock and either Marilyn Crispell or Masabumi Kikuchi (who grunts along with his playing almost louder than the piano). Lovano has had ups and downs, most recently doing well with his ballads album which featured Hank Jones and Paul Motian (but don’t get me started on the Sinatra album). I guess Lovano doesn’t normally do a lot for me, and I dutifully check his albums out when they show up, but I don’t seek them out.

But the new ECM disc by the trio may be the best thing Lovano has ever done, and certainly is one of the best Motian trio discs period. I Have the Room Above Her marks the return to ECM, where Motian was initially harbored (Manfred Eicher was the one who encouraged Motian to be a band leader and to write his own music), and where Frisell got his start also. As part of the Crispell trio, Motian hasn’t been a stranger to ECM lately, and that group also performs some of his own compositions, but it’s nice to finally have this one under his own name.

Interestingly, for much of the disc Motian is barely present, choosing instead to emphasize an almost ambient interplay between Frisell and Lovano, keeping the mood of the disc (ECM-style?) very dark and atmospheric. Which is typical Motian, a musician who is more concerned with the overall musicality and vision of a project than with whether he himself gets to play a lot. When the two melody players get together, the sound is instantly recognizable. Frisell outdoes himself, all the while never hitting the distortion as he’s done in the past (the weirdest Bill gets is on “Harmony”), and also all the while steering clear of the country influences that have taken over his playing over the last ten years.

Many of the songs are core repertoire that the trio has relied on over the past twenty-odd years, Motian compositions like “Dance” and “Osmosis I” and “One in Three”. The title track is a little heard wonder by Jerome Kern and they end with the Monk tune “Dreamland”. Only on “Osmosis I” and “Harmony” do they ratchet the pace and intensity up (if you’re looking for the skronking of Live in Tokyo, you won’t find it here), which are roughly half way through the set, the centerpiece, if you will. It’s like everything flows organically to that point and away from it.

The amazing thing about the Frisell-Lovano-Motian trio is that, after all this time, they still make music together. The logistics of getting them all in one room must be heroic. Keith Jarrett’s standards trio has a similar longevity and empathy (and is also on ECM), but very few groups in the history of jazz have the kind of lifespan we’re talking about here, and the maturity of their interplay and understanding of each other’s music shows that experience. And while they all make fine music out on their own, there really is a magic that happens on this album. The identity of the trio takes over and great music results.