Veterans, Newcomers Push Onward With Help From Unexpected Places

It’s appropriate--given the new year, the new century, the new millennium, yada yada--that the January jazz releases include unusually pioneering efforts. Some come from established artists, some from relatively unknown new performers; all have compelling qualities.

Pianist Ben Sidran, of course, is a familiar name, both as a performer and as an articulate observer of the passing jazz scene. Both those skills are on full display in a most unusual project, “The Concert for Garcia Lorca” (****, GoJazz, available Jan. 31). The program--which features Sidran, saxophonist Bobby Martinez, drummer Leo Sidran and bassist Manuel Calleja--was recorded live in June 1998 at the Granada home of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca in celebration of the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Sidran has woven a vibrant musical-poetic tapestry, combining his spoken adaptations of Garcia Lorca’s essays with performances of jazz and blues pieces (including “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “Whisper Not,” “Lover Man” and “Freedom Jazz Dance”). The results are extraordinarily gripping, as Sidran finds linkages between the passion of Garcia Lorca’s poetic imagination and the rhythms, improvisation and verbal language of jazz. At a time when thoughtful ideas have been in short supply among new jazz recordings, this is a stunningly successful example of the music’s rich capacity for creatively dense expressiveness. The album is beautifully packaged in a hardcover-book-like package that includes complete texts (in English and Spanish) for Sidran’s various narrations.

Fred Hersch is also a well-established pianist. But his work with woodwind artist Michael Moore and percussionist Gerry Hemingway in the trio Thirteen Ways has been far less visible. And that’s a shame because “Focus” (*** 1/2, Palmetto Records) is the product of a remarkably synergistic connection among three gifted players. The music, for the most part, has a floating, impressionistic quality, even in the more energetic pieces. The interaction between Hersch and Moore is especially simpatico, their long association--reaching back to the early ‘80s, when both were students at the New England Conservatory--clearly a factor in the remarkably intuitive qualities of the freely improvised passages.

Kurt Rosenwinkel has been described by John Scofield as “one of the finest and most creative jazz guitarists playing today.” High praise from a reliable source. And Rosenwinkel’s playing on his major-label debut album “The Enemies of Energy” (***, Verve) leads one to wonder what’s taken so long. His compositions are the product of an inquisitive musical mind, far more concerned with textures, images and ideas than with virtuosic displays of technique.

Straight-ahead jazz passages occasionally break through, countered by pieces such as “The Polish Song,” an apparently spontaneous guitar-voice piece that Rosenwinkel describes as “a gift from the spirits. . . . I am singing in what I think might be Polish.” Not all of the pieces succeed as well as the more engrossing numbers, despite fine contributions from tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Scott Kinsey, bassist Ben Street and drummer Jeff Ballard. But they are all the work of a gifted young artist--one with a promising musical future.

The use of 12-note rows in jazz has popped up from time to time, rarely successfully, given the relatively non-harmonic nature of serial composition. Guitarist Bruce Arnold’s new album, “A Few Dozen” (***, Muse Eek, available online from CDNow and Amazon.com), manages to maneuver its way through a difficult musical thicket to produce some intriguing results. It’s not clear to what extent Arnold has actually attempted to use the serial method of proceeding through a 12-note row (with its retrograde and inverted forms) as a fundamental element in the way he has structured the music. But, ultimately, what matters is the effectiveness of the results rather than the nature of the method. And Arnold’s music--as performed by his trio, with drummer Tony Moreno and bassist Ratzo B. Harris--never loses its contact with jazz, even when both the linear and clustered sounds emerge in unexpectedly acerbic fashion. At the very least, he deserves credit for his effort to expand the potential of the jazz palette.

How’s this for a program of music: pieces by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jimi Hendrix, Erik Satie and Huey “Piano” Smith? Eclectic, to say the least. But not surprising coming from the Kamikaze Ground Crew, a group that has performed together intermittently since 1983, when it was the stage band for productions by the Flying Karamazov Brothers. “Covers” (***, Koch Records) is yet another album that stretches the definition of jazz. But it’s hard to imagine some of the tracks--Hendrix’s “Electric Ladyland” for one--performed in this fashion by anyone other than players with jazz roots. In fact, several of the tracks--the two Stockhausen pieces (from his “Tierkreis”)--have the distinct sound of some of the more classically oriented avant-garde jazz of the ‘60s. The Smith medley, predictably, is pure New Orleans, and a final number by Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo, showcasing the saxophones of Peter Apfelbaum, Gina Leishman and Doug Wieselman, resonates with references to Ornette Coleman. Call it an album that gets a bit more interesting with each hearing.