Some­times I get the feel­ing that jazz is just now emerg­ing from a long dark age, a time of cul­tural rev­o­lu­tion spear­headed by a gang of chil­dren wield­ing antique farm imple­ments as instru­ments and Time-Life Giants of Jazz com­pi­la­tion LPs (circa 1979) as their Holy Scripture.

Awright, maybe my Chil­dren of the Corn par­al­lel is less than per­fect. But it’s true that a recent gen­er­a­tion or two of young jazz musi­cians decided that the ways of their elders were just fine and dandy (thanks for ask­ing!), and that they needed change like He Who Walks Behind The Rows needed the Unitarians.

In other words: Who wants a Prius when Grandpa’s old John Deere trac­tor runs just fine?

I thought about this when lis­ten­ing to recent CDs by two sea­soned gui­tarists: Dom Minasi’s Dis­so­nance Makes the Heart Grow Fonder and Duck Baker’s Every­thing That Rises Must Con­verge. No mind­less con­formists, they. Both started play­ing impro­vised music at a time when young jazz musi­cians found their own way as a mat­ter of course. Today, both are, shall we say, griz­zled vet­er­ans. Yet unlike the young, jazz-schooled musi­cians of the last cou­ple of decades, Dom and Duck appar­ently never ceased try­ing to con­found the squares. If that meant throw­ing the old ways under the bus — even a shiny new hydro­gen fuel cell-powered bus — hey, that’s the way it goes.

[Full Dis­clo­sure Time: I’ve played with at least three out of the four mem­bers of the Dom Minasi String Quar­tet. Among Dom, cel­list Tomas Ulrich, bassist Ken Fil­iano, and vio­lin­ist Jason Kao Hwang, only the lat­ter has some­how avoided shar­ing a band­stand with me (I think; it’s entirely pos­si­ble that we played together at a long-forgotten jam ses­sion). The fact that they’ve played with me does not dimin­ish the fact that they’re great musi­cians, nor does it pre­vent me from rec­og­niz­ing as much. And while I’ve never played with Duck, he is a Face­book friend. So alrighty then.]

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The Dom Minasi String Quartet’s Dis­so­nance Makes the Heart Grow Fonder reminds me very much of the early World Sax­o­phone Quar­tet when Julius Hemphill was its dom­i­nant com­poser. Like Hemphill at his most exper­i­men­tal, Dom is fond of inten­tion­ally vague and prickly non-tonal har­monies. His struc­tures are loose, allow­ing for a max­i­mum of per­sonal inter­pre­ta­tion by his musi­cians, yet he’s aware of the ben­e­fits of an occa­sional more-tightly-structured approach.

The quar­tet com­prises some of the best impro­vis­ers on their instru­ments, not sim­ply because they have chops and imag­i­na­tion – although they have plenty of both – but also because they are essen­tially ego-less. Their unselfish­ness is con­ta­gious, as is the unfil­tered pas­sion with which they go about their busi­ness. In Hwang, Ulrich, and Fil­iano, Minasi has cho­sen three artists pos­sessed of com­pre­hen­sive musi­cal­ity, heed­less of styl­is­tic bound­aries and arbi­trar­ily imposed limitations.

Dom’s own play­ing demon­strates remark­able breadth; not only does he pos­sess the top-notch jazz guitarist’s req­ui­site gifts of fleet phras­ing and inef­fa­ble swing, he also exhibits a rest­less curios­ity about the very nature of sound (tun­ing, tim­bre, tex­ture, vol­ume, etc.), form, and tonal orga­ni­za­tion – as a gui­tarist, cer­tainly, yet also as a com­poser and con­duc­tor. There’s lit­tle about his music that’s tra­di­tional in a jazz sense. Instead, there’s an all-encompassing inquis­i­tive­ness that takes in clas­si­cal as well as jazz influ­ences. Dom and his band walk a won­der­fully crooked and fas­ci­nat­ing path.

No less com­pelling is Duck Baker’s Every­thing That Rises Must Con­verge. Sub­ti­tled “Free Jazz Gui­tar Solos,” this is the fin­ger­style acoustic guitarist’s “record­ing debut in this style,” accord­ing to his liner notes, despite the fact that he’s played free jazz for over forty years. In lis­ten­ing, it seems almost incom­pre­hen­si­ble that it’s taken him this long to doc­u­ment this facet of his work, so accom­plished and inspired is the music con­tained herein.

There aren’t many fin­ger­style (or “fin­ger­pick­ing,” to use Baker’s pre­ferred term) free jazz gui­tarists, it seems. I’m guess­ing one rea­son is because the style best lends itself to a chordal man­ner of play­ing; I’m sure some­one will cor­rect me if I’m wrong. In any case, while the sheer nov­elty of the sound accounts for some of its appeal, more impor­tant is the dis­tinc­tive­ness of Baker’s approach, which tran­scends the inher­ent phys­i­cal aspects of his instrument.

Twelve tracks com­prise the album: ten based on Baker orig­i­nals (one – “Juxta Pose” – played twice) and one set to Ornette Coleman’s “Peace.” Baker evi­dences a range of strate­gies, from raw coun­try blues aggres­sion to a John Williams-type clas­si­cism to quasi aleatory non-idiomatic free improv. A con­sum­mately spon­ta­neous sen­si­bil­ity dominates.

Like Minasi, Baker has catholic inter­ests. He’s absorbed a world of music and incor­po­rated it all into his own earthy voice. Indeed, his capac­ity for engag­ing dis­parate musics, com­bined with a man­i­fest intel­lec­tual and emo­tional com­mit­ment to cre­at­ing in the moment, invests his music with great power.

Both Dom and Duck embody the intre­pid­ity that’s been a defin­ing aspect of jazz for most of exis­tence. Such open­ness and eager­ness to chal­lenge norms used to be the province of the young and reck­less. That largely ceased to be the case in the ‘80s. For a long time, too many young jazz musi­cians played along to get along, leav­ing the more adven­tur­ous vet­eran play­ers the task of buck­ing a trend of con­ser­v­a­tive zombie-ism. From what I see, rebel­lious­ness is start­ing to gain a foothold again, thank God. There’s noth­ing more bor­ing than an overly earnest kid. If this rise of a punk­ish atti­tude in jazz turns wide­spread, we can thank older cats like Dom and Duck for hav­ing helped kept it alive dur­ing some very dark times.

At a time when hard ques­tions are being asked about its intrin­sic worth, Con­nie Crothers gives jazz edu­ca­tion a good name. She’s been at it as long as I can remem­ber, and prob­a­bly for some time before that. She’s a player who teaches and a teacher who plays, and she does both so man­i­festly well as to make the order of pri­or­ity irrelevant.

Con­nie doesn’t have a sinecure at some uni­ver­sity, but instead teaches out of her Brook­lyn loft. As dis­tinc­tive a pianist as she is, she doesn’t turn out lit­tle car­bon copies of her­self, or a skein of idiomatic-correct rules-followers. Rather, she men­tors gen­uinely cre­ative artists and helps them to best express them­selves in myr­iad ways. Indeed, Connie’s ped­a­gogy doesn’t pro­duce dis­ci­ples so much as peers – and in many cases, cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tors. You’d be hard-pressed to find one of her stu­dents who doesn’t describe her in the most glow­ing terms.

Con­nie was invited to curate The Stone in New York for the sec­ond half of Sep­tem­ber. She used the oppor­tu­nity to show­case not only her own con­sid­er­able artistry, but also that of some of her gifted stu­dents, past and present. They include clar­inetist Bill Payne, with whom Con­nie recently recorded a beau­ti­ful album of free impro­vi­sa­tions; alto sax­o­phon­ist Richard Tab­nik, who’s been ply­ing his idio­syn­cratic lyri­cism around New York for years (to a great deal less acclaim than he deserves); sax­o­phon­ist Nick Lyons, a young impro­vis­ing alto sax­o­phon­ist of great promise; and many more. I can’t make many of the hits, liv­ing as I do a good 60 miles from the near­est sub­way sta­tion. How­ever, I was able to make it into the city this past Sun­day to catch two sets — the first a solo con­cert by pianist Carol Liebowitz, the sec­ond fea­tur­ing Trance­For­ma­tion, a trio com­pris­ing Con­nie on piano, her for­mer stu­dent Andrea Wolper on vocals, and  Ken Fil­iano on bass.

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I didn’t think to ask Carol Liebowitz whether she’s stud­ied with Con­nie, but I assume she has. Liebowitz cer­tainly exhibits the kind of free-thinking indi­vid­u­al­ity Con­nie seems to fos­ter in all her stu­dents – in other words, she doesn’t sound much like any­one but her­self. Her set con­sisted of a dozen-or-so short, freely impro­vised vignettes. She took care to con­trast each move­ment from the one before it, fol­low­ing loud with soft, busy with laconic. She made good use of par­al­lel har­monies; most of her play­ing was chordal, mak­ing her infre­quent use of sin­gle lines all the more strik­ing. Liebowitz’s con­so­nances were touched with dis­so­nance, and her dis­so­nances pos­sessed the clar­ity of a major triad. The indi­vid­ual pieces, as well as the con­cert itself, were mod­els of con­ci­sion. After each, Liebowitz would look up shyly, as if to cue the capac­ity audi­ence that she had fin­ished, though there was sel­dom any doubt, so well-constructed were her improvisations.

Know­ing Ken and Con­nie (and by rep­u­ta­tion, Andrea) as I do, the night’s sec­ond set could have con­sisted of prac­ti­cally any­thing. Although they’re adept at every aspect of jazz per­for­mance – “From Rag­time to No Time” (to quote the title of an album by the late Beaver Harris) – when left to their own devices they tend not to com­part­men­tal­ize, but rather treat jazz as a seam­less con­tin­uum wherein any­thing is pos­si­ble. This night, they dwelt mostly on the outer fringe, a place where con­ven­tion is politely asked to sit down and shut the hell up.

Like Liebowitz before them, the trio impro­vised freely, although they divided their per­for­mance into fewer and longer episodes. The three musi­cians both ful­filled and sub­verted expected roles. Wolper played the melodic lead, but was as often inclined to evanesce, her non-verbal vocals grace­fully merg­ing with the whole, espe­cially Filiano’s bass. Given the human voice’s unlim­ited capac­ity to make strange sounds, the temp­ta­tion exists for a vocal impro­viser to indulge his or her most out­ra­geous urges. I’ve heard some do just that, and it’s sel­dom pretty. Wolper resists the impulse. She incor­po­rates such tech­niques as glos­so­lalia and melisma spar­ingly and effec­tively. She’s not a bit afraid to play it straight and sim­ple. Nei­ther is Fil­iano. Although a pro­foundly intense impro­viser and prodi­giously gifted bassist, he’s in such com­plete con­trol of his resources as to let the music flow nat­u­rally. When it’s time to play the bassist’s cus­tom­ary role, he plays it. When it’s time to take the melodic lead, he takes it. When it’s time to act the per­cus­sion­ist, he acts it. Crothers – a world-class pianist of remark­able skill and imag­i­na­tion and appar­ently lit­tle, if any, ego – is just as sen­si­tive to the music’s needs. Her touch varies from hard as nails to smooth as but­ter. Her energy is as lim­it­less as her imag­i­na­tion, her com­mit­ment to cre­at­ing in the moment com­plete. Com­bined, the trio cre­ated music that veered from lean min­i­mal­ism to extreme max­i­mal­ism, from 20th-century “new music” strate­gies to the unruli­est free jazz. Like all the best impro­vised music, the per­for­mance was end­lessly var­ied and supremely, joy­ously evoca­tive of its sin­gu­lar time and place.

It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to hear Con­nie Crothers in a con­text such as this, know­ing that she’s also as fine and as dis­tinc­tive a straight-ahead jazz pianist as you’ll ever find. Her art lit­er­ally knows no bound­aries. That she shares that open­ness so freely with such a wide range of tal­ented stu­dents gives me hope for the future of jazz edu­ca­tion – not in the insti­tu­tional sense, but in the person-to-person, wisdom-handed-down-from-one-generation-to-the-next sense. That’s where the most effec­tive jazz teach­ing has always been done, and, I sus­pect, where it will con­tinue to be done, long after over­priced uni­ver­sity jazz pro­grams run out of teenagers to fleece. On a day when the 2009 MacArthur Grants were announced with­out the inclu­sion of a jazz musi­cian, I’m think­ing, for 2010, the selec­tion of Con­nie Crothers would be a great way for the Foun­da­tion to get back into the groove.

I heard ter­rific sets at The Stone last night by pianist Carol Liebowitz (play­ing solo) and Trance­For­ma­tion, a trio com­pris­ing pianist Con­nie Crothers, vocal­ist Andrea Wolper, and bassist Ken Fil­iano and the music was ter­rific but I had to take the last train outta Grand Cen­tral and it didn’t get me home until 2:00 am and I had to get up at 6:00 to get the kids off to school and they were ter­rific but I was so tired, so very tired. Plus, I thought I had a doctor’s appoint­ment at 8:45 this morn­ing that required me to fast from 8 pm last night (and I last ate two hours before that), so in addi­tion to being a zom­bie, I was a hun­gry zom­bie, only I couldn’t snack on brains. The doctor’s appoint­ment was a mis­take, which was ter­rific, but after eat­ing a break­fast of fat-free potato chips and french onion dip (very Zen), I went back to bed for a few hours, which wasn’t enough to make me feel the slight­est bit bet­ter even though it’s now 1:30 in the after­noon. So no review of  the con­cert today, but I’ll get on it tomor­row morn­ing, hope­fully after restor­ing my life’s equi­lib­rium by sup­ping and sleep­ing and liv­ing and lov­ing and … hey, where’s the remote? … oh great, the dog has it …