To say that the piano/trombone duets on Starting a Story combine jazz and classical sensibilities risks suggesting a resemblance to “Third Stream Music,” that ambitious and sometimes ponderous musical hybrid. But Nabatov and Wogram’s performances have not a trace of ponderousness: the classical influences give the music an attractive lightness and elegance, and encourage rather than restrain the players’ sense of mischief. A Wogram piece inspired by Ligeti’s piano études is titled, with dry wit, “The Mistake.” Its spiralling abstraction deviously works back towards an explicit jazz idiom, until the piece comes to seem just as much an homage to perpetual-motion compositions of Monk’s like “Skippy” and “Work.” (There’s a subterranean logic at work here: Ligeti has acknowledged his admiration for the solo recordings of Monk and Bill Evans.)

A dry wit is also evident in the titles of Nabatov’s pieces. “The Wheel of Misfortune” and the truly bizarre “Keep Going” (a musical Venn diagram: a piano solo and a snuffling trombone solo only briefly intersect in the middle) both glance at the roles of trial-and-error and persistence in both the processes of improvisation and in learning how to play. The longest piece, “Practise Makes Poifect,” is Nabatov’s playful but serious portrait of the process of musical development, and it seems curiously self-referential. It opens with a parodic musical warm-up (arpeggios and scales); next comes a ringing major-chord tune strongly reminiscent of “Simple Simon” from Nabatov’s early disc Tough Customer. At the conclusion the musicians move off into musical deep waters, with a passage closely related to the left-hand part of “Positive Transparencies,” on Perpetuum Mobile (recorded a few months later).

The classical borrowings are only one facet of Starting a Story. Indeed, the disc’s presiding spirit is in many ways the jazz pianist Herbie Nichols. Nabatov’s “For Herbie” is a blowing theme very much in the spirit of the dedicatee, which may also be heard in a piano trio version on Nabatov’s Three Stories, One End. The disc’s one non-original is a reading of Nichols’ “East 117th Street.” The choice of dedicatee is a resonant one, given the instrumentation: with his reading of “East 117th Street” Wogram joins the company of trombonists such as Roswell Rudd, George Lewis and Wycliffe Gordon who have shown how well Nichols’ music comes across on the instrument.

Despite the link I’ve indicated between two tracks on the albums, Starting a Story and Nabatov’s solo disc Perpetuum Mobile are otherwise quite different in mood and texture. The solo disc touches only sparingly on jazz idioms – principally in the opening piece, “Which Way Up?”, with its sprightly implied swing. The disc is instead best thought of as a meditation on the classical piano tradition and on the characteristic harmonic languages of composers such as Prokofiev, Ligeti, Messiaen and Stockhausen. “Perpetuum mobile” is the term in the keyboard literature for a particular musical device: an unbroken, rhythmically even flow of notes. Though Nabatov has inverted the phrase for his disc’s title, the device is nonetheless at work in a number of these pieces: “In Motion,” which is conceived of as “an homage to the Russian school”; the aptly named “Flow Chart” (which has a few touches recalling Paul Bley’s solo performances); and “One-Handed Bandit,” which is quite possibly the most remarkable feat of right-hand-only improvisation on record since Tristano’s “Bud.” There’s a sternness and occasionally (as on the climactic “U-Trillo”) a ferocity to this disc which in many ways contrasts with the duets with Wogram. Recorded a few months apart in 2000, these two discs are at once satisfying in themselves, yet also can be heard as complementary musical statements by one of the most extraordinary pianists in the current jazz scene.

Nate Dorward

Coda, July/August 2003