Mr. Hersch, a pianist, comes with a sensibility well informed by the best American composers in jazz, theater and films, by Brazilian music, by classical music. His taste is new; everybody in the band works on the crumbly line between the bop tradition and free-form improvisation. But Mr. Hersch is old-fashioned in that melodys development and resolution remain important to him, no matter what the context.
So in a new piece called Kijito Mwanana a Swahili phrase meaning gentle stream the repeated piano line and the babbling melodies, moving through all the instruments onstage, didnt lead toward percussive minimalism. It was a short song with shape. By the sound of it, any relation to the work of Steve Reich was accidental.
This wasnt the band that will be heard on Mr. Herschs next album, due in the spring; thats his Pocket Orchestra, which uses a more rare instrumentation of piano, percussion, trumpet and voice. This is the Trio + 2, assembled over the last five years to play what you could call more typical new jazz. Beyond Mr. Hersch, it includes the saxophonist Tony Malaby, the trumpeter Ralph Alessi, the bassist John Hebert and the drummer Nasheet Waits. Besides Kijito Mwanana the group played a handful of other new songs. Skipping had a syncopated rat-a-tat theme arranged for both drums and piano while Free Flying, inspired by the Brazilian composer Egberto Gismonti, used the lopsided walk of a samba groove with a good, stuttering tune for piano and horns.
One good thing about a flexible jazz band that seems this well balanced is that it can catch you off guard with extravagance. Mr. Hersch must have been thinking about Wayne Shorter on Tuesday; besides an original piece written in honor of Mr. Shorter called Still Here, he played his arrangement of Mr. Shorters piece Fall. The band seemed at the start to literalize a mysterious piece of writing; its structure was clear when this band played it. But toward the end Mr. Waitss drumming, full of changing phrases, gradually rose in the arrangement until the piece almost seemed like a concerto for drums. Nobody could have seen that coming.
