Anat Fort: The Dreamworld of Paul Motian

Borrowing a sentiment from the title of the 1959 Riverside Records album Everybody Digs Bill Evans, it is safe to say that pianist Anat Fort digs Paul Motian. Her The Dreamworld of Paul Motian says so.

We can attribute a big part of Motian's career success to pianist Bill Evans (1929 -1980). Portrait In Jazz (Riverside, 1960) was the first Evans album that included Motian in the drummer's chair. More followed, including the groundbreaking Sunday At the Village Vanguard (Riverside Records, 1961) and Waltz For Debby (Riverside Records, 1962), works that redefined the concept of the piano trio, introducing an equality of input mode between Evans' piano, Scott LaFaro's bass and Motian's drums.

Motian left the Evans fold in the early '60s and moved into a successful career of his own as a leader that included albums on ECM Records and the Winter & Winter, JMT and Soul Note labels. He also enjoyed a long-term, early-in-the-game side man stint with pianist Keith Jarrett.

His style was unorthodox. He shuffled on the drum kit, he murmured, he rustled. More often than not he veered away from the timekeeping chores usually assigned to his instrument as he elevated, with an enlightened quirkiness, every group in which he participated, with a conversational and often subtle way of playing. Fort dug it all, and was able, early in her career, to finagle a recording session with Motian that resulted in A Long Story (ECM Records, 2007), a top-ten album voice for that year.

Drumming aside, Fort almost certainly found his ability to write succinct, straightforward, though often off-kilter, tunes to her liking. His tunesmithing—as quirky as his drumming style—helped draw her into the Motian fold, as expressed on The Dreamworld of Paul Motian, where she and her quartet explore 10 of the drummer's compositions, well-known, little-known and never-before-recorded. The drummer built an extensive discography as a leader, featuring Great American Songbook tunes as often as it did his own folksong-like compositions, and Fort and her quartet—Gary Wang on bass, Steve Cardenas playing guitar, joined by drummer Matt Wilson—dove in.

The quartet made a beautiful Motian world. Not unlike Thelonious Monk, he wrote distinctive tunes that seemed to suggest altered states of consciousness and/or alternative dimensions, where reality is blurred one moment and crystal clear the next. Fort and guitarist Cardenas—who played on four Motian albums between 1999 and 2007—move like a pair of practiced dancers, weaving and slipping around each other with a fluid grace. Wilson plays in the spirit of Motian, not drawing attention to himself, but rather laying down subtle textures and soft murmurings, sounds that seem to exist on the border of conscious perception, around the curve of a stairway or beneath the floorboards, coming up through the wood from the basement.

A fine tribute to a master musician. It could not have been done any better.

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