This new album finally may bring him the national recognition he's long deserved. In spite of stylistic indebtedness to Monk, Randy Weston, and Andrew Hill, his original tunes, often in odd meters, sound like no one else's. Backed by the highly energetic team of drummer Andrew Cyrille, bassist Reggie Workman, trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, and the Jackie McLean-like young alto-saxman Abraham Burton, Tapscott spins out modal masterpieces. "Mothership" improvises on some melodies you could imagine lifted from a long-lost Joe Henderson session from the '60s. The high point is Tapscott's musical portrait of a homeless woman, "Drunken Mary/Mary on Sunday," as full of humor and tragedy as Yeats's poems to Crazy Jane. The rhythms stagger, strut funkily, linger long in memory. One of the best piano-led sessions of this decade.

-- Norman Weinstein