Samuel Blaser - Live at Cornelia Street Café (Live) (2021)

The relationship between jazz and classical music can be fraught. Old stereotypes hold that a musician’s commitment to one interferes with their ability to meet the other’s requirements, or that the virtues of one somehow confer superiority over the other. Swiss trombonist Samuel Blaser is not the kind of guy who will get his foot caught in one of those traps. He can play each with an insider’s understanding and appreciation, so much so that his Consort In Motion project, which lasted from 2010 to 2013, didn’t sound like something from column A and something from column B, but a buffet where you could get a belly full of both.

The motive for the project’s formation was quite practical. “The theme was chosen as an excuse to get a deal with Kind Of Blue Records,” Blaser recalls. “But it was a nice excuse that pushed me to do more research in the baroque domain.” The group that he assembled for the first, self-titled record included bassist Thomas Morgan, who had played in the quartet that Blaser lead during his years living in the USA, and two much more experienced musicians who first played with him on the day of the session — pianist Russ Lossing and drummer Paul Motian.

When the time came to play the record release concert at Cornelia Street Café, though, the bassist was scheduled to play elsewhere, so Eivind Opsvik got the gig. Ironically, Morgan’s job fell through, so he observed the concert from the audience. That concert heralded the beginning of one beautiful relationship, and a tantalizing intimation of another that was not meant to last. Lossing has gone on to become a regular member of Blaser’s bands, appearing most recently on the 2018 recording, Early In The Mornin’ (Out Note Records). But while Motian was sufficiently taken with the trombonist’s playing to confide to Lossing that he might hire Blaser for a future project, the drummer’s health failed and he died in November 2011.

The same music-first unsentimentality that led Blaser to treat this selection of themes by Claudio Monteverdi, Girobaldi Frescobaldi, and Biagio Marini like a book of tunes that were as ripe for reinterpretation as any more familiar standards, can be heard at work in the ways that this concert’s performances differ from those on Consort In Motion. Having given himself the opportunity to share the bandstand with musicians whose first-hand experiences include work with Bill Evans, John Cage, Thelonious Monk, and Anthony Braxton, he gave them plenty of room to maneuver on the bandstand. It falls to Opsvik, not Blaser, to introduce “Sinfonias” with an exquisite arco statement. On the same tune, Lossing ranges from delicate inside-piano accents to an almost oratorical solo, and his rich accompaniment during Blaser’s solo amplifies the melancholy of “Passacaglia.” And Motian is like a ninja, light of touch and never quite where you expect him to be. Check out the way he plays a little behind and off to the side while Lossing solos on “Vespro,” and yet somehow gets to the resolution just ahead of him. Of course, Blaser doesn’t miss a change to go head to head with the drummer, and it’s a gas to hear Motian reframe the action around the trombonist’s bold multiphonics from one second to the next on “Tormento.” What a shame that this was their only concert together!