The Brooklyn Rail

IBeam Brooklyn is a slip of a performance space, but for a small venue it packs a punch. Located a few doors down from the Gowanus Canal, the single room evokes the days of loft jazz, with its plywood floors, white brick enclosure, and high ceilings. Blank sandstone-colored panels punctuate the walls, and three large canvases surrounding the performers—roughly evoking Gerhard Richter, Franz Kline, and Japanese calligraphy—read as pillars of abstraction, testaments to the possibilities of open-ended thought. As in a lot of little spots, the sound is rich and remarkably clear, and it seems an ideal place for improvising musicians to listen and respond to each other’s playing. The low number of seats only adds to the intimacy.

Pianist Carol Liebowitz has played there regularly for years, and its aesthetics seem to fit hers well. She recently came in with a quartet featuring alto saxophonist Nick Lyons, bassist Ken Filiano, and drummer Vijay Anderson for a night of thoroughly reimagined standards, from “What is This Thing Called Love?” to “I’ll Remember April.” Their approach (and the harmonic reworking of a couple of their tunes) owed a great debt to the pianist Lennie Tristano, as well as to his student Connie Crothers. Tristano helped create a strain of early bop that took the music in the direction of the abstract, focusing on dynamic interplay. Its absence of a blues feel led some critics to dismiss it as cold, but that misses the crucial point that the music reaches for a different quality, which arises from the dramatic possibilities of that interplay. Certainly this band’s playing lacked no sensitivity, with Lyons in particular seeming to explore the most delicate tributaries of tone and melodic line. Whether taking on standards or free improvisations (another Tristano specialty), the group participated in a close-listening, intuitive approach to the material that yielded strong results.

The evening made for an instructive contrast with a show I saw the night before at Carnegie Hall, a set by the superb vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant. With a stellar band led by pianist Sullivan Fortner, and augmented by The Knights chamber orchestra performing exquisite arrangements by Darcy James Argue, Salvant also made standards the centerpiece, though more of the modern variety: two Sondheim songs, “Being Alive” and “Send in the Clowns,” as well as “Lush Life,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and the film track “Alfie.” She is a commanding performer, with superb vocal control and great power across her expansive range. Salvant made the often-performed material sound fresh by adding her own pure musicality to it; although the lyrical sweep of the tunes was in full effect, she also deconstructed and revised the typical phrasing, leaning into sharp rhythmic turns and always emerging intact. This is a performer who can seemingly do anything, but it is the choices she makes and the personal authorship she gives the material that take it to the highest level. In that way, she shares with Liebowitz a commitment to reinventing the standard.

Standard is a funny word, one that cuts several ways. At one level, it speaks of an average, regular thing, perhaps a plain endeavor: pretty standard. Yet in another way, it speaks of excellence, of work that maintains or exceeds a high level: setting a standard. But given the exceedingly distressing times we are living in, it raises a number of melancholy questions: in a political environment in which lies are peddled freely, what is happening to our standards? Do we even speak a common language anymore, one in which we accept and respect standards of truth-telling? The de-familiarization of our national environment is happening so fast that the idea of having and holding a standard seems like an aspirational quest, one with ever-diminishing chances of succeeding.

In the musical sphere, what does it mean to play a standard? At some level, it represents core recognizability, and can serve as a beacon—as long as its essential meaning can be reinvigorated. Liebowitz has long thought about just how to do that. In an email interview for this article, she wrote, “Since childhood, I’ve loved the tunes from the Great American Songbook, and in my twenties developed a strong desire to express my own personal connection to the music.” Liebowitz finds the way back to these standards by taking in different approaches to the music and filtering it through her playing style, her particular sensibility. It is a style of easeful counterpoint, with a powerful left hand defining the lower register and a freely unbound right hand, meandering and sliding into Monk-like exploratory clusters.

Liebowitz and Lyons call a new duo recording (their second, as part of a collaboration lasting well over a decade) The Inner Senses (Steeplechase/LookOut). She sees close connections between what she performed with her group and these newly conceived collaborations: “Whether it’s a ‘free’ improvisation with no preconceived elements or playing on a standard tune, we’re letting each note guide us intuitively to the next.” Liebowitz’s piano technique is informed by her years of studying classical music, and she displays a rich compositional sense while improvising.

Lyons has some of the gleaming acidic sound of his one-time teacher Gary Bartz, and his melodic investigations always demonstrate a searching quality. As in some of the great duet performances by Steve Lacy, featuring Mal Waldron and others, there is a remarkable attunement to one another, a joyous feeling of interplay resulting in unified expression. Another touchpoint is the brilliant Joe Henderson recording, Inner Urge, released in 1966 and still making waves. The delving deeper and going within expressed by that group, which also featured McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, is echoed here.

Sometimes going within and getting in touch with the inner self seems the only antidote to a context of no context, an assault on institutions and their meaning, a stunning disregard for the truth. But it is really just another key component of our spiritual life that needs to be addressed. Going inward, following and developing the inner senses, is what keeps our humanity alive, what instinctively links us to our fellow travelers. But it is the coming back again, and rediscovering the meaning of our public life, of our polity and obligation to one another, that binds us, and represents our best shot at any kind of unity.

At its best, jazz still represents the ideal of a successful pluralistic society. Even that very ideal is under fierce attack today. Having this music around, being played with respect and dedication during a national meltdown, actually models something we desperately need, a new standard of cooperation, a true reaching across the aisle, a bridging of the great divide.

What meaning is derived from the standards we set (or play, or hear) comes, in part, from context. What I hear in artists like Salvant and Liebowitz is an underlying seriousness of purpose. That can be hard to convey in our carnival-like political atmosphere (remember when Harris called Trump an “unserious man”?), when the center is not holding, and our national arts institutions are looked upon with contempt. But maintaining it, insisting upon it, creating it anew, is an urgent task.