E-Mail This Article to a Friend Bop, hard bop, and free bop (continued)

PROBABLY THE MOST IMPRESSIVE bebop credentials of the bunch belonged to alto-saxophonist Frank Morgan, a disciple of Charlie Parker and some say his heir apparent until he himself was derailed by drugs and spent more than two decades in and out of jail. Morgan survived incarceration to make a comeback in the mid ’80s. He suffered a stroke in 1998 but made a quick recovery, and at Scullers last Thursday, he sounded in fine fettle. Supported by the ubiquitous Mathews, bassist Cecil McBee, and drummer Billy Hart, Morgan in the first set of the night stayed with Bird and an otherwise blue-chip bebop program, favoring their chord progressions over the modal scales of some of the Coltrane and Miles Davis pieces on his recent City Nights (High Note).

It didn’t matter. From the first notes of Dizzy Gillespie’s "A Night in Tunisia" (which Morgan playfully announced as "A Night in Boston"), the sound was timeless. You can phrase bebop differently from Morgan, but you can’t phrase it better — the way he approaches and then falls away from a note, the vocal quality he can get when he finishes a trill by leaning on that final note and holding it. His relaxed medium-tempo "Scrapple from the Apple" was shot through with little quicksilver bursts of double-time passages. He played the melody of the ballad "All the Things You Are" with bluesy authority, then departed from it freely with runs in his upper register, a low note that came as close as he did all night to making his beautiful tone honk, and then a fluttering ascent and a laughing bend.

Hart played hard from the get-go, giving the saxophonist some challenging kicks, but Morgan was unfazed, and at the break after the first tune, he asked the soundman to turn it down — "We’re just a little bebop band." Mathews again made me wonder where he’s been all my life (despite his résumé as a sideman, he doesn’t show up much as a leader), mixing his bluesy melodic lines with abstract arpeggiated runs. McBee matched his grounding walks with solos that explored melodies in an expressive buzzing upper register punctuated by deep tuba-like notes. Through the whole set, the band members kept smiling at one another. "Have you ever had scrapple?" Morgan asked Mathews after the second tune. "Not lately," the pianist answered. "That’s better than never," Morgan said. And they all laughed.

LET’S FACE IT, there are too many guitarists, so how to explain that in addition to Hall, Martino, Metheny, Scofield, Frisell, and all the rest, there’s yet another guy who doesn’t sound quite like anyone else? Michael Musillami late last year released Spirits (Playscape), a collection of pieces written and arranged by a bandleader he used to work with, the late saxophonist and composer Thomas Chapin, who died of leukemia in 1998. Arranged for octet, the album is workmanlike and detailed, the pieces often set to subtle Afro-Latin rhythms laced with free passages and plenty of fine soloing, especially from saxophonist Tom Christensen and trombonist Art Baron.

But it’s on a previous Playscape album, 2003’s Beijing, with 10 originals and one piece by Chapin, that Musillami, working in a freer take on bop, really shines. Instead of an octet, he’s fronting a trio with bassist Joe Fonda and drummer George Schuller (they come to Zeitgeist Gallery in Inman Square on February 4), and the sound is intimate and lean. Because of the reduced instrumentation, all three players can stand in the front of the mix at the same time, and of course there’s more room for Musillami’s own playing. He doesn’t achieve his effects through volume or distortion. So when he breaks into fast chording on the title track, the sound is dry but fierce. And his patterns are unpredictable, always sensitive to the overall shape and texture of an individual piece, so a fast run of 16th notes in "Swedish Fish," say, just adds to the variety of the overall composition instead of being an end in itself. And the ensemble groove on a piece like "Op-Ed" is unbeatable. At Zeitgeist, the Musillami trio is scheduled to go on at 9:30, and the suggested donation is $15; call (617) 876-6060.

20/20 HINDSIGHT DEPT. If you have a chance before it disappears from newsstands, pick up — or at least browse through — the January edition of Downbeat, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary. There’s plenty of eye-opening material from the archives, including the cover story on Rahsaan Roland Kirk, but true Downbeat fans will savor the many wonderful disses of the so-called masterpieces in the back pages, including jazz-crit sage Ira Gitler slamming Dave Brubeck’s Time Out in April 1960 ("If he wants to experiment, let him begin with trying some real jazz") or the great hard-bop trumpeter Kenny Dorham confronting Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity in July 1965 (Ayler, says Dorham, at one point "sounds like a baby crying for candy with a whining ball in its mouth"). Best of all is the end-page Blindfold Test, the traditional ground zero of musician-on-musician dissing, where Charles Mingus, from the April/May 1960 issue, opines on Ornette Coleman, "Now aside from the fact that I doubt he can even play a C scale in whole notes . . . in tune, the fact remains that his notes and lines are so fresh." Hearing an Ornette record on Symphony Sid’s New York radio show, Mingus realizes that "it made everything else he was playing, even my own record that he played, sound terrible."