E-Mail This Article to a Friend History lessons (continued)

THE 90-MINUTE DOCUMENTARY by director William Cayton for which Miles Davis recorded A Tribute to Jack Johnson is now hard to find, but the re-release of the music coincides with the broadcast of Ken Burns’s new four-hour epic, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. (Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s review is on page 27 of the Arts & Entertainment section.) The latter comes with its own original soundtrack by another trumpeter/composer/bandleader, Wynton Marsalis.

If a Jack Johnson project — with Miles’s favorite sport as a topic and the politics of black self-determination a major subtext — was an incentive for Miles to leap head-first into the unknown, Unforgivable Blackness is an opportunity for Wynton once again to visit the past. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily. As you might guess, the playing is idiomatically perfect. It would be hard to distinguish Marsalis originals like the parade-ground "High Society" or the dancehall "Jack Johnson Two-Step" from the many ancient jazz and American pop and blues numbers here if you didn’t have a credit sheet. On the latter, Marsalis, using a plunger mute, deploys his wah-wah as effectively as McLaughlin. And the hallmarks of timbral beauty and ensemble cohesion are everywhere. Listen to Victor Goines’s deep, soulful bass clarinet on Marsalis’s "But Deep Down," or Goines’s bass clarinet with Wycliffe Gordon’s breathy trombone on the lovely "Trouble My Soul," Herlin Riley’s idiomatic choked cymbal crashes on Jelly Roll Morton’s "New Orleans Bump" and "Deep Creek," Eric Lewis’s Ellingtonian piano on the latter, or any of Doug Wamble’s acoustic-guitar playing.

"New Orleans Bump" is an example of the Marsalis group’s discipline — they play together, every rhythmic fillip, every shift in dynamics, the overall warm timbral and harmonic blend. With perfectly delineated syncopations and riffing melody, "New Orleans Bump" is the album’s hit single. Which says as much about Morton as it does about Wynton. There are "modern" touches in the harmonies of Wes Anderson’s alto solo on that one, and Marsalis’s "Fire in the Night" fits in with his standard post-bop style. The one piece that sounds completely modern is Marsalis’s "Rattlesnake Tail Swing," arranged here for six clarinets and piano. With its exquisite ambiguous voicings, it alludes to the past without re-creating it and doesn’t refer specifically to anything except itself.

THE BAD PLUS are likely to sound startling even to those weaned on Davis-style jazz rock. A piano trio unlike any other, they mix rock bombast (and backbeats) with jazz abstraction and classical chops. They’ve now made several visits to town since the release of their Columbia debut, These Are the Vistas, in 2003. For last Wednesday night’s first set at the Regattabar (part of a three-night stay Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday), they drew a small but vocally enthusiastic audience, and all the elements that make the Bad Plus so entertaining and so maddening were in place: impressive technique, humor, the wit and the bombast, their basic disregard of jazz orthodoxy.

Pianist Ethan Iverson was the bald, bespectacled straight man and MC in a dark suit, tie, and white shirt; David King, also bald and beefy, in black jersey and brown pants, was the hyperkinetic drummer, often rising from his stool at climaxes; and bassist Reid Anderson was the short-bearded hippie with the floppy ’do in blue jeans and white T-shirt with green long sleeves.

The Bad Plus first drew attention in part with their covers of unlikely pop and rock: Nirvana’s "Smells like Teen Spirit," Blondie’s "Heart of Glass," Aphex Twin’s "Flim." At the Regattabar, they played only three covers in their 12-song 95-minute show — Björk’s "Human Behavior," Queen’s "We Are the Champions," and an encore of Black Sabbath’s "Iron Man."

Although it was fun at the Regattabar to translate Björk’s melody and imagine her voice in Iverson’s piano line, or to try to figure out what the unannounced "standard" was that turned out to be Queen, the Bad Plus’s covers tend to be good novelty items without much substance. Here’s where you get their tendency toward the good ol’ rock-and-roll rave-up: plugging a riff or bass vamp over and over with increasing, finally shattering, volume spelled by low-key interludes.

It’s their originals where they’re at their best. Iverson’s opening "Let Our Garden Grow" began with a melodic, deep-toned solo from Anderson full of jazz-like strummed abstractions; then he locked into Iverson’s left hand and King’s drums for the rubato wind-up-toy rhythm. Iverson’s right-hand melodic line was equally toylike and whimsical, with breaks for boppish runs, another bass solo with piano comping, and a short ensemble free section. The piece ended with Iverson’s right hand playing solo and fading out. He announced the tune as being based on "I Got Rhythm" changes in "the Dexter Gordon tradition." If he says so.

King’s "The Empire Strikes Backwards" was equally fascinating, in a herky-jerky odd meter alternating with a more or less straight time and marked by dramatic fortissimo unison cadences from the trio. After the show, I asked Iverson about the meter, and he said it was basically "uncountable." The band, he explained, often memorize a written phrase that becomes the rhythmic unit of a piece. Just one more reason why, maddened or not, I’ll be at the next Bad Plus gig.