[Dixielandjazz] RIP Paul Motian

[Stephen G Barbone]

Musicians who saw/heard Paul Motian during the past 55 years could not  
help but be impressed with his jazz musicianship.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

Paul Motian, Jazz Drummer, Is Dead at 80
by Ben Ratliff - NY TIMES - Nov 23 2011

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 and lived in Manhattan.

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 informed what jazz  
sounds like today. He had been in the pianist Bill Evans’s 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 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, Monk. After leaving  
his partnership with 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 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.