Marsalis has tackled imposing jazz masterworks before, covering the entirety of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” in the studio and onstage in the early 2000s, but at its best, his “Belonging” goes deeper. On the original album, the title track is a brief, reflective interlude, played as a solo-free duet between Jarrett on piano and Jan Garbarek on tenor. Marsalis takes his time with the piece, stating the theme on soprano saxophone and leaving space for the rhythm section — the pianist Joey Calderazzo, the bassist Eric Revis and the drummer Justin Faulkner — to set up a lovely rubato ballad texture. Re-entering, Marsalis starts out playing gentle, aqueous phrases, then steadily crescendoes to a piercing intensity for the final theme statement, the band swelling to match him as his tone grows ever more urgent. It’s a performance that both honors and amplifies the somber beauty of the source material.
“The Windup” represents the other pole of “Belonging.” A rollicking, acrobatically twisty theme, it suggests boogie-woogie gone prog, conjuring a mood of infectious delight. Marsalis’s quartet has embraced it as a favorite in recent years, and an earlier version appeared on the band’s 2019 live album, “The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul.” Like in that performance, Faulkner is the driving force on the new studio take. Here he pushes even harder, complementing the opening piano-and-bass vamp with a busily festive beat marked by a barrage of syncopations on snare and cowbell.
Later in the track, the band borrows a quirk of the original Jarrett arrangement, in which piano, bass and drums drop out before the saxophone solo, leaving Garbarek to play an unaccompanied lead-in. Marsalis and company use the moment to veer temporarily into stormy free jazz, a move that only makes their shift back into up-tempo swing for the rest of the leader’s solo feel that much more exhilarating. On “’Long as You Know You’re Living Yours,” meanwhile, they dig into the strutting backbeat feel of the original — cribbed by Steely Dan for the title track of “Gaucho” — with similar gusto.
The Marsalis band’s readings of the more upbeat “Belonging” tunes underscore the sense of fun inherent in those pieces, and Lehman and his bandmates likewise tease out the playfulness within Braxton’s exacting compositional style. Most of the selections on “The Music of Anthony Braxton” — recorded in 2023 at the Los Angeles bar ETA and released ahead of its namesake’s 80th birthday this June — date from his mid-70s stint on Arista Records, when his highly individual approach, drawing on both the jazz and classical avant-gardes, won enthusiastic support from open-minded critics and dour pans from more myopic ones.
The rendition of “23C,” one of the more striking pieces from Braxton’s classic “New York, Fall 1974” LP, is a standout. On the original, Braxton (on flute), the trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and the bassist Dave Holland align on an ingenious cyclical theme, tacking on one new phrase with each run-through, while the drummer Jerome Cooper adds fluttering texture. Here, though, the drummer Damion Reid joins Lehman, Turner and the bassist Matt Brewer in playing the written material, while stirring in bits of crisp, driving groove, adding a subtle shimmy to Braxton’s staccato lines. Later, the band loops the composition’s concluding phrase to create a sleek, asymmetrical pattern for the saxophonists to solo over. The overall effect is that of a hip contemporary remix.