E-Mail This Article to a Friend Bop, hard bop, and free bop Jazz nights in Boston, plus Michael Musillami and Downbeat disses BY JON GARELICK

It was only by coincidence that I caught a heavy dose of live bebop over the past few weeks — and I’m not even counting the George Coleman/Harold Mabern band and pianist Bill Charlap, whom I didn’t get to see. If anything, these shows proved that working within a tradition doesn’t mean being hidebound.

Back on January 8, trumpeter Roy Hargrove was at Scullers, working not with his electric R&B-flavored RH Factor but with a quintet. I had last seen Hargrove at the 2003 Boston Globe Jazz Festival, where, fronting the RH Factor in Copley Square, he was dressed in a striped Adidas track suit, his hair in dreadlocks. For the late set at Scullers, Hargrove led his acoustic quintet: alto-saxophonist Justin Robinson, veteran pianist Ronnie Mathews, bassist Dwayne Burno, and drummer Willie Jones III (who also plays in the RH Factor). Hargrove wore a natty, tapered pin-stripe three-button suit with blue-and-silver striped tie and matching pocket handkerchief, and the dreads were gone in favor of a close-cropped pate.

In 2003, after the release of the first RH Factor CD on Verve (there’s a new EP of outtakes from that session, Strength), Hargrove said he would continue to work with his then-quintet — the same one he brought to Scullers, where they served up straight-ahead hard bop. The Scullers show did not make one long for the RH Factor. Hargrove, Robinson, and Mathews extol all the hard-bop virtues: its blues and soul-music tunefulness and gospel testifying as well as its bebop abstraction. And as the elder statesman, Mathews authenticates the band’s pedigree, having played on a number of classic Blue Note hard-bop dates including Lee Morgan’s 1965 session The Rumproller. When Hargrove is at his nasty best, Morgan is one of the trumpeters he recalls.

The band stuck to well-worn covers for the first half of the 80-minute set. They took Kenny Dorham’s "Lotus Blossom" (not to be confused with Billy Strayhorn’s) way up-tempo, with Hargrove running through the chord changes in smooth sequences, quoting a half-verse of "Call Me" before breaking into a repeated, syncopated five-note exclamation in the upper register. On a mid-tempo version of Benny Golson’s "Along Came Betty," Robinson luxuriated in Charlie Parker blues licks as he slid across bar lines. The band hit their best groove of the night with Mathews’s minor-keyed fast waltz "Selena’s Dance," Mathews setting the mood with Middle Eastern scales and dervish ascending sequences, Burnham driving the surging rhythm, Robinson building his solo to an ecstatic climax of slurring, clustered notes.

Since Hargrove came along as a Wynton-sponsored protégé in the early ’90s, I’ve always found him more emotionally accessible than his mentor: he develops his solos organically, in linear rhythmic patterns that often end in nasty explosive bursts that feel spontaneous rather than preordained. In "Selena’s Dance," he built to a two-note exclamation that he repeated twice, and he sat on that final second note until it buzzed. On Gordon Mack’s ballad "This Is Always," he switched to flügelhorn, crafting beautifully phrased choruses in a broad, warm tone. The band finished the night with Weldon Irvine’s funk number "Mr. Clean," with local guy Jowe Omicil sitting in for a crowd-pleasing soprano solo.

IF YOU WANTED to understand why Kenny Barron is so esteemed, all you had to do was check out his performance of Duke Ellington’s "Don’t You Know I Care" at the Regattabar last Saturday night. Barron and his young band had just finished a blisteringly fast "Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise," and Barron took to the keyboard solo for the Ellington classic. For the first few choruses, Barron focused on the piece’s melodic contours and inner voicings, keeping time with four-to-the-bar chords in his left hand; then he changed up with a more staccato attack, then broke the melody down into abstract bebop runs. The piece, and his performance of it, seemed inexhaustible.

Barron can also play very fast, as he did on the set opener and Thelonious Monk’s "Well You Needn’t" (a duet feature with drummer Kim Thompson), quoting licks from Bud Powell, the original speed-demon bebop pianist. Barron’s "Marie Laveau" (a tribute to the legendary New Orleans voodoo queen) was slow and appropriately swampy, suspended on a repeated four-bar ascending melody with a built-in stop time. It’s a simple line, with Thompson’s triplet cymbal figures working against the stately 4/4 meter, but vibist Stefon Harris and flutist Anne Drummond were tentative compared with Baron, who solo’d last and spun free-ranging streams of notes over the tune. Harris was a good mate for Barron, capable of building motives from the rhythm section into soaring unbroken lines. The band (with Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass) can be heard on Images (Sunnyside). They’re good — and best of all, they inspire Barron. Even a noisy table down front couldn’t throw him off his game.