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Revisiting an Old Boss Named John Coltrane

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The pianist Steve Kuhn can play John Coltrane’s music meaningfully without sounding as if he lives by it. That shows self-possession, for a couple of reasons. Coltrane was the most influential jazz musician in the late 1950s and 1960s, when Mr. Kuhn got started. And Mr. Kuhn, now 71, also has something many of his peers don’t: a small but significant association with Coltrane on the bandstand.

He played with the first version of Coltrane’s quartet, in the spring of 1960, during a long gig at the Jazz Gallery in the East Village before McCoy Tyner took over to finish the run. And that was it. Later Mr. Kuhn’s music followed a path very different from Coltrane’s, one of stricter harmony, piano-trio subtlety and endless curiosity about ballad standards.

Nearly 50 years later he has released a quartet record of Coltrane’s music, “Mostly Coltrane” (ECM). On Tuesday at Birdland he played some of it — elegantly — in a group that put the saxophonist Joe Lovano alongside Mr. Kuhn’s regular working trio, with David Finck on bass and Billy Drummond on drums.

Mr. Kuhn has gone about this project with nearly awesome counterintuition. Coltrane’s music went through radically different phases, sometimes cutting his audience into sections; bravely, Mr. Kuhn has chosen a lot of Coltrane music from phases after the one he knows best.

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