E-Mail This Article to a Friend Ode to interplay Parker & Lewis, Steve Lacy, Roswell Rudd BY FRANKLIN BRUNO

Jazz history is often written around the achievements of individuals, instrumentalists mostly, with the occasional composer or bandleader thrown in for good measure. It’s not that there’s nothing to this idea — call it the Ken Burns Theory. The ways in which Pops and Bird and Trane vaulted over the stylistic conventions of their periods are the best evidence for Romantic notions of individual genius this side of Van Gogh.

But jazz is also about response. It’s a poor understanding of improvisation that fails to recognize what even the most brilliant soloists draw from their sidemen, and vice versa. And there are other kinds of response in play as well: to a loved or loathed popular song, to the music’s history, to the culture at large. The three discs below demonstrate the range of ways in which veteran players can draw creative energy from one or another kind of challenging encounter

Evan Parker’s liner notes to from saxophone & trombone (PSI), a reissue of a 1980 duo date with George Lewis, are pointedly terse: "The music here was composed by improvising." Well, yes, but there’s more to the story than that. The two musicians come from different corners of the free-music universe. Parker helped found the British "non-idiomatic" movement, studiously avoiding all reference to jazz tradition. Lewis came up through Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which extended that tradition from an Afrocentric vantage point.

Recorded not long after Lewis had left Anthony Braxton’s mid-’70s quartet, these five pieces find the trombonist more likely than Parker to allow himself a fragment of post-bop phrasing — but only slightly. Both players are masters of extended technique: between Parker’s split notes and Lewis’s stuttering, percussive air pushing, the two horns often give the illusion of four. The penultimate track moves from staccato cat chasing to a quietly dramatic climax, with Lewis’s long tones underscoring an uncharacteristically lyrical Parker riff before both gently wink out. Their interplay isn’t always this distinctive, but it’s always a dialogue: remove either voice and the other wouldn’t make a lick of musical sense.

Lewis also appears on Steve Lacy’s new The Beat Suite (Sunnyside/Universal), alongside the soprano-saxophonist’s most frequent associates: vocalist (and spouse) Irene Aebi, double-bassist Jean-Jacques Avenal, and drummer John Betsch. But the dominant conversation here is between the players and the leader’s settings of texts by 10 Beat-associated writers, some celebrated (Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac), some obscure (Lew Welch, Bob Kaufman). Some choices are contentious: Bay Area poet Jack Spicer, who’s represented by the tart "Agenda" ("Whatever you do/Be a free fucking agent"), always took issue with the era’s free-spiritedness.

The source material falls at the raw end of the poetic spectrum, but the ensemble’s treatment of it is well cooked. Lacy’s exacting matches between text and tune are closer to art song than hipster jazz-and-poetry clichés, and Aebi’s arch delivery is as far from conventional expressiveness as a singer can get. It’s the instrumental sections that swing most satisfyingly, as on the two-horn head that frames Kerouac’s "Wave Lover" and the gorgeous bowed solo that Kaufman’s somber "Private Sadness" elicits from Avenal. The Beat Suite won’t dispel Lacy’s cerebral reputation, but its richest passages take Lew Welch’s pledge in "Ring of Bone" to heart: "Always to be open . . . that all of it might flow through."

Roswell Rudd’s current release is as accessible as Lacy’s is difficult. Malicool (also on Sunnyside) documents the trombonist’s two-week summit meeting with West African musicians including Toumani Diabate, Mali’s reigning virtuoso of the kora — essentially a 21-string harp with guts. (Diabate was also prominent on last year’s Astralwerks release Mali Music, which was helmed by Blur’s Damon Albarn.) The disc’s originals (a few each by Rudd and Diabate) are never less than pleasant, but the interloper’s choices of outside material are the real standouts. Thelonious Monk’s "Jackie-ing" is an especially inspired call: the bridgeless, riff-based tune maps onto his companions’ accustomed ideas about structure, but with enough Western harmonic trickery built in to throw them off balance in fascinating ways.

Riskier still is "Malijam," which is actually Beethoven’s "An die Freude" retooled for clattering pitched percussion. As the awful title suggests, the track skirts cheesiness by a hair’s breadth. Early on, it evokes a gamelan orchestra hired by a PC branch of F.A.O. Schwarz. Suddenly, Rudd re-enters with a greasy, full-throated statement of Harold Arlen’s "Get Happy," connecting one paean to salvation with another, earthier one in a single stroke. Although the African players may have recognized the tune, I’d wager they weren’t aware of Ted Koehler’s lyrics: "We’re headin’ cross the river/Wash your sins away in the tide." But you can bet your life Rudd was.