Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2011 September 02 • Friday

Paul Motian's trio with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano was my favorite band. The past tense is called for, because Motian has said that the trio is done. A recent Wall Street Journal article quoted him as saying that "it has run its course".

This is the first year in at least fifteen years that they won't be playing at the Village Vanguard. Seeing them there was one of my favorite late-summer traditions.

They were together for a very long time, made a lot of recordings, played hundreds of gigs. They changed quite a bit over the years and I think they would have continued to evolve, but I can understand why Motian might want to lower the curtain on this long-running project while they're still going strong.

What I find harder to understand is why he's playing the same material with another drums/electric guitar/tenor sax trio.

I saw this band's first set last night. They opened with Monk's "Played Twice" and followed that with "Good Morning Heartache". After that came Motian's "Morpion", Jerome Sabbagh's "Indian Song", the Kern/Gershwin standard "Long Ago and Far Away", Motian's "Fiasco", Sabbagh's "La Fée Morgane" and finally Motian's "Mumbo Jumbo" and, of course, "Drum Music".

It's not fair to complain that Ben Monder and Jerome Sabbagh are not Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano, but the comparisons are unavoidable (when they're not playing Sabbagh's tunes, anyway).

Motian has had to have subs for Lovano a couple of times in recent years. Maybe that's what gave him the idea for this new trio.