Jazz has a fraught rela­tion­ship with the word ‘com­poser’ and the world of notated music that is gen­er­ally under­stood to be the West­ern clas­si­cal tra­di­tion. It’s some­thing like two broth­ers, one appre­cia­bly younger, with a dif­fer­ent per­son­al­ity and spirit of inde­pen­dance, no small amount of con­fi­dence, but who still finds the older one worth admir­ing, even imi­tat­ing and, in his fre­quent indif­fer­ence, pow­er­fully intim­i­dat­ing. It’s a mod­ern phe­nom­e­non in that jazz is a mod­ern music, only around a hun­dred years old, grow­ing up in a world with extra-musical issues that can’t help but have an effect on the music-makers.

There are cul­tural ele­ments that have worked insid­i­ously to exac­er­bate this: the growth of aca­d­e­m­i­cally minted pro­fes­sional cre­den­tials, as vir­u­lent and unde­sir­able as clap in a sub­ma­rine, the pref­er­ence, as record­ing tech­nol­ogy and mass media grew, for phys­i­cal relics over oral his­tory, and the cul­tural sta­tus of jazz through its first few gen­er­a­tions, a mon­grel Amer­i­can music played by Africa-Americans and Jews and immi­grants, an art music that began as a dance (and drug) music, a home-grown tra­di­tion so young that it defies the very notion of tra­di­tion while simul­ta­ne­ously and jeal­ously pro­tect­ing and pre­serv­ing it’s own basic dogmas.

Jazz and clas­si­cal music are dif­fer­ent styles with dif­fer­ent cri­te­ria. They’ve met and com­min­gled for about as long as jazz itself has been around, since Stravsinky picked up some rag­time sheet music and Bix Bei­der­becke recorded “In a Mist,” and as human art forms, they share a com­mon bond in the explo­ration and expres­sion of intel­lec­tual and emo­tional expe­ri­ence. How they get there is com­ple­men­tary but so, so different.

Clas­si­cal music began as some­thing some guys were just play­ing, some­where, but through the influ­ence of intel­lec­tual and litur­gi­cal tra­di­tions, the patron­age of the artis­toc­racy and the rise of the mid­dle class with a desire to be cul­tured, it became the composer’s music. Glo­ri­ously so. Since the devel­op­ment of nota­tional lan­guage, clas­si­cal music has been dri­ven by men and women work­ing out abstract thoughts in their heads and find­ing new ways to con­vey those in musi­cal instruc­tions. The body of music is fre­quently called a lit­er­a­ture, because it is a vast col­lec­tion, on paper, that tells the story of the accu­mu­la­tion of pos­si­bil­i­ties, of how to express the word of God, of how to struc­ture mul­ti­ple voices in simul­ta­ne­ous con­ver­sa­tion, of how to describe a jour­ney through non-existent lands and the return to home, of how to tell the world the unname­able things one feels and, in the 20th cen­tury, how to prop­erly rebuild civ­i­liza­tion after two cat­a­clysmic wars.

Jazz also began as musi­cians play­ing some­thing, some­where, prob­a­bly for dancers. And since it began as the grama­phone and radio were replac­ing the piano as the way the middle-class expe­ri­enced music, it quickly became recorded music. Where com­posers learned by study­ing the scores of other com­posers, jazz musi­cians learned by lis­ten­ing to the records of other musi­cians — aural/oral his­tory as opposed to doc­u­ments on paper. Jazz forms have almost always been sim­ple, vehi­cles for the musi­cians to explore as a means of per­sonal and group expres­sion, rather than intel­lec­tual hand­i­work to be rein­ter­preted by some­one else. Jazz was, and still largely is, song-based, and the com­posers were the song­writ­ers who came up with the mate­r­ial and the musi­cians who added to it and made some­thing new out of it when they played.

So, what’s the beef? It’s in how jazz looks at the role of the com­poser. There is no shame in writ­ing songs rather than sonatas, and a good song, with a good tune, is in many ways harder to write. Iden­ti­fy­ing the song­writer — the com­poser — is inno­cent enough, but as jazz moved from a pop­u­lar music to an art music after Be Bop, and espe­cially after free music, the idea of the com­poser often became some­thing of a weird, assertive cult. On records that were free, or fussy, and in con­certs, it became a thing to speak of ‘com­po­si­tions’ as an icon. It was always an odd expe­ri­ence, at the end of an Art Ensem­ble of Chicago con­cert, when Joseph Jar­man would announce the band and the instru­ments they played, includ­ing ‘com­po­si­tions’ in a per­for­mance that might have had only one stretch of music iden­ti­fi­able as pre­vi­ously being organized.

At other points along the spec­trum, there has been fussy and poorly-written fuax-Baroque coun­ter­point from the Mod­ern Jazz Quar­tet to Return to For­ever, the string­ing together of aes­thet­i­cally related tunes into arbi­trary ‘suites,’ and the bad Schu­mann of Brad Mehldau’s Ele­giac Cycle and the vapid art songs of Fred Hersch’s Leaves of Grass. The right word here is ‘pre­ten­tious,’ and I mean it because in these exam­ples I see jazz musi­cians work­ing very hard to put over the pre­tense that they are some­thing they are not, which is clas­si­cal com­posers. They are not, they are jazz com­posers. There’s no shame in that. In fact, jazz has had impor­tant com­posers in the past, musi­cians mak­ing jazz and doing what composer’s do, which is orga­nize musi­cal mate­r­ial. And the cur­rent jazz scene has bur­geon­ing exam­ples of musi­cians rapidly expand­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties in the music through com­po­si­tional means. That they are doing noth­ing at all like Bach or Beethoven or Stravin­sky did is good for jazz, good for all music.

Over the past few years, this move­ment has cen­tered around Pi Record­ings and the music made by Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Mahan­thappa, Muhal Richard Abrams, Tyshawn Sorey, Amir ElSaf­far and espe­cially Steve Lehman and Henry Thread­g­ill. Seth Ros­ner and Yulun Wang founded the label to put out music they were attracted to, and as Ros­ner explained to me, they were attracted to artists like Iyer and Thread­g­ill and Lehman, who had either first or sec­ond gen­er­a­tion con­nec­tions to the AACM (directly for Thread­g­ill, via Roscoe Mitchell for Iyer) and Anthony Brax­ton, one of Lehman’s grad­u­ate school teach­ers at Wes­leyan (along with the great avant-garde con­cep­tu­al­ist Alvin Lucier). Cast­ing aside the dual for­mal bag­gage of the blues and spe­cific and inap­pro­pri­ate clas­si­cal struc­tures, these musi­cians are find­ing ways to make jazz that expands on the pos­si­bilites of the style in ways that are deeply idiomatic, join­ing the hand­ful of true peers who found ways to get beyond song form and still make music with impro­vi­sa­tion, swing and fire: Elling­ton, Monk, Min­gus, George Rus­sell, Steve Lacy, Darcy James Argue.

Some of the most notable of these discs are on Pi, like Iyer’s the­matic In What Lan­guage?, Sorey’s abstract That/Not (dis­trib­uted by Pi), Lehman’s extra­or­di­nary com­bi­na­tion of com­plex, electronic-based rhythms with spec­tral har­mony on Tra­vail, Trans­for­ma­tion and Flow. More recent releases include Abram’s phys­i­cally mel­low and emo­tion­ally and intel­lec­tu­ally deep set of duets on Sound­Dance, and Sorey’s con­sol­i­da­tion of his more exploratory ideas into a for­ward dri­ving and still highly sur­pris­ing and cre­ative style on Oblique-I, an intrigu­ing disc that reveals very sub­tle and sophis­ti­cated com­po­si­tional think­ing. Sorey is cre­at­ing a kind of jazz Min­i­mal­ism, using repeated poly­phonic lines to build struc­tures that make both room and safety for dis­so­nant har­monies, coher­ent impro­vi­sa­tion and real grooves. This is the kind of thing jazz can do, as art, that clas­si­cal com­po­si­tion is weak at, and it’s the kind of thing that jazz can, and should be doing, to break out of its own musi­cal ghetto, where strange and per­haps inse­cure notions of tra­di­tion force a gen­eral con­ser­vatism on the music.

Lehman is not the first jazz musi­cian to pur­sue a doc­tor­ate in com­po­si­tion, that was prob­a­bly Mel Pow­ell, but he is one of the most impor­tant. He’s far too mod­est to admit this, but his series of discs on Pi have staked out ter­ri­tory in jazz that no one else has set foot in. Before Tra­vail, Trans­for­ma­tion and Flow, there was the unprece­dented rhyth­mic com­plex­ity of On Mean­ing and the delib­er­ately frag­mented but some­how expan­sive Demian as Posthu­man. It’s easy to explore the tech­ni­cal aspects of what he’s doing, like adapt­ing the types of rhythms and changes in meter that for a while seemed pos­si­ble only in com­puter soft­ware, through the tal­ents of Sorey, to the frame­work of Hard Bop, or using micro­tonal­ity as a means to build har­monic struc­tures. The impor­tance of these advances is hard to over­state: as much as swing­ing rhythms and impro­vi­sa­tion appear to explore free­dom, only using those rhythms and only work­ing within song form struc­ture is an exis­ten­tial dead-end, one that requires sheer vir­tu­os­ity to break out of. That’s fine for indi­vid­ual tal­ent, but deadly for the music as a whole.

If he had only tried and failed at these ideas, he would have a last­ing legacy, but his music and records suc­ceed bril­liantly because they are, fun­da­men­tally and aes­thet­i­cally, jazz, and jazz of the most phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally excit­ing kind. He’s a mon­ster player, full of fire, extra­or­di­nary tech­nique, and an intense sound and attack. His impro­vis­ing is coher­ent, dri­ving and incred­i­bly quick think­ing, and his bands fol­low suit. His music is so much more rhyth­mi­cally com­plex than most jazz, so much more har­mon­i­cally sophis­ti­cated and inter­est­ing, and so deeply sat­is­fy­ing. His lat­est, Dialec­tic Floures­cent, with Matt Brewer on bass and Damion Reid on drums, is closer to a blow­ing ses­sion, but with a syn­the­sis of his exper­i­ments of push­ing the meter and pulse around off cen­ter and back again, and with micro­tonal­ity inte­grated in his play­ing in a way that goes beyond mere bend­ing of notes and adds onto the har­monic depth. It’s a real show­case of what a great jazz player Lehman is, and the judi­cious use of other musician’s tunes, Coltrane’s “Moment’s Notice,” Jackie McLean’s aggres­sive “Mr. E,” Duke Pearson’s hip “Jea­nine,” and an amaz­ingly intense “Pure Imag­i­na­tion” that itself harkens back to Coltrane’s most soul-abbrading play­ing on his Atlantic records. No jazz record this year could exceed it for sheer impact, and Lehman’s three night res­i­dency at the Jazz Gallery this week promises to be one of the out­stand­ing gigs of the year, and is urgently rec­om­mended (Times and tick­ets here).

Lehman’s not the only musi­cian to do cre­ative com­po­si­tional work within what is cur­rently the pre­dom­i­nant style of Neo-Hard Bop. I’ve been enjoy­ing the depth and sur­prises in Tomas Fujiwara’s new CD with his band The Hook Up, The Air is Dif­fer­ent. One of the strengths is the band, with Trevor Dunn and Mary Halvor­son excelling at both sup­port­ing the ensem­ble and bring­ing in a very outsider-ish sense of taste — they move the music for­ward by teas­ing at it irrev­er­ently. Fuji­wara has a com­po­si­tional sense that shares some­thing of John Zorn’s mag­pie approach, but with­out the cul­tural didac­ti­cism. The TV-Spy-Show riff of “Dou­ble Lake, Defined,” is the foun­da­tion for the tune, not a means to prove how hip the drum­mer is. Super­fi­cially con­ven­tional, all the tracks are loaded with unex­pected swerves that end up being not only com­pletely log­i­cal but com­pletely sat­is­fy­ing. A very cool record, both for what it proves about how jazz can be played and for how fine the think­ing and play­ing are.

There are also some recent attempts to write music that gets beyond stan­dard jazz that don’t quite suc­ceed, through a com­bi­na­tion of flawed ambi­tion and tech­nique. Bassist Eivind Opsvik’s news Over­seas IV and Joel Harrison’s Search don’t quite bring it all together, and what I hear is com­po­si­tional mea­sures that are too wide when they would work bet­ter with more focus and depth. Both these CDs mean to make large-scale com­po­si­tional state­ments but instead end up like jazz con­cept albums, with great moments under­cut by ideas that are over­stated and under­done. Opsvik’s por­ten­tous open­ing track, with Jacob Sacks run­ning through a very ordi­nary set of chords on the harp­si­chord, trades the under­stand­ing of Baroque struc­ture for its sound. The track elides into “White Armour,” which fur­thers the prob­lem: the leader seems to think that being a com­poser means mak­ing music that has longer dura­tion than reg­u­lar tunes, but Monk and Webern would dis­agree. As do I. Being a com­poser means cre­at­ing and orga­niz­ing mate­ri­als in a way that makes sense, and there’s very lit­tle here that makes sense because there’s very lit­tle that does any­thing other than go on, and on. The tal­ented band, includ­ing Bran­don Seabrook and Tony Mal­aby, get very lit­tle chance to con­tribute any­thing. Harrison’s release is more suc­cess­ful, but it’s not fully real­ized. Some of the com­pos­ing is fine and gets beyond stan­dard jazz, while some of it just uses a small string sec­tion to add orches­tral weight to ideas that the basic band could play well with­out mak­ing any larger state­ment. Har­ri­son has a lighter touch then Opsvik, and appre­ci­ates that he’s still mak­ing jazz: the band gets to groove and flex it’s con­sid­er­able mus­cles. Too much is made of this as a ‘com­posed’ record: there is solid writ­ing but noth­ing that coher­ently tran­scends the form, like the way Dave Dou­glas’ com­po­si­tional state­ments always end up being an under­nour­ished skele­ton for impro­vi­sa­tion, just another fancy tune. Search does the same kinds of things Tom Har­rell has been doing for a while, and those are good things that it does well, but it col­ors very much within the lines.

Then there is Henry Thread­g­ill, who has a new record on Pi, Tomor­row Sunny/The Rev­elry, Spp. Thread­g­ill doesn’t par­tic­u­larly con­sider what he is doing as jazz any­more, and he’s right, but it’s also use­ful to think of it as jazz, both because that’s the tra­di­tion he’s made his way out of, and because he and his musi­cians have so much idiomatic jazz in their indi­vid­ual play­ing. As a musi­cian and a com­poser, his whole career has been tes­ta­ment to the motto, Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future, with one foot on the aes­thetic land of cake­walks, Scott Joplin and King Oliver, the other seek­ing a way to struc­ture poly­phonic impro­vi­sa­tion. It took decades of hard work, explo­ration, qui­etly rad­i­cal deci­sions to get beyond “major and minor key har­mony,” as he told me. He dis­cov­ered his cur­rent tech­nique through study­ing the music of Varese, who him­self sought to break away from the stan­dard struc­tures of clas­si­cal music but still work within the tra­di­tion of being a com­poser. Not that Thread­g­ill sounds like Varese! The new disc is famil­iar in style to his music from the sec­ond half of Up Popped The Two Lips, the sec­ond release ever on Pi. It’s also dif­fer­ent than pre­vi­ous ones, includ­ing the two vol­umes of This Brings Us Too, in part because he’s added the addi­tional voice of Christo­pher Hoff­man on cello, give him the ideal con­fig­u­ra­tion of two sets of three voices, and the band is more con­fi­dent and skilled in his method, which is both rad­i­cally sim­ple, like all great break­throughs, and rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent than the way most musi­cians learn to think about music.

Henry is a com­poser, a composer’s com­poser, and he’s cre­ated an entirely new way to orga­nize mate­ri­als of music, cre­at­ing tool kits rather than just tunes, means for his group Zooid to work within a com­mon frame of har­mony, rhythm and time while still allow­ing multi-faceted free­dom to impro­vise, to accom­pany, to take time out from the move­ment of the piece to explore some inter­est­ing dis­cov­ery and still find one’s way back together in key places. It’s fair to call this con­tem­po­rary cham­ber music and also, because of the con­cep­tual con­nec­tion to tra­di­tional poly­phonic jazz, to call it jazz. It also ful­fills the jazz aes­thetic of being music for your feet, heart and mind simul­ta­ne­ously. It also is a close com­pan­ion to the music of Earle Brown, a jazzman turned avant-garde com­poser and one of the impor­tant fig­ures of 20th cen­tury music, who, like Thread­g­ill, cre­ated bril­liant and unusual struc­tures for orga­niz­ing music that, as he said, would be both iden­ti­fi­able and sound dif­fer­ent each time they are played. The record is excel­lent, more mys­te­ri­ous than the pre­vi­ous two but also so much more assured and coher­ent. A major event just by being, it’s one of the best of the year and will most likely be shunted aside by jazz’s musi­cal and crit­i­cal estab­lish­ment. Lehman’s is more acces­si­ble, but it’s a lonely place where he and Thread­g­ill stand, but the music is great and the body of music is so much the bet­ter for their contributions.

UPDATED to fix Damion Reid’s name and spec­ify label infor­ma­tion for That/Not