By Kyle Gann

You’ve got to appreciate how difficult it is, what Jesuitical subtlety it requires, to stake out new territory in jazz today. With the Free Jazz of the ’60s, the genre seemed to have catapulted to the limits of chaos; with the Young Lions of the ’80s, jazz retrenched and became a museum repertoire art, like classical music. That rebound created an illusion that jazz history is a two-dimensional highway: you go forward, and when you reach the end of the road, there ain’t nothin’ to do but turn around and go back. But what if you could… step off to the side?

It takes a musical mind as penetrating as John Esposito’s to open up that third dimension. His is a music steeped in jazz, yet abstracted from it. Twelve-bar blues and rhythm changes course through his veins, but when he composes, he deconstructs them, layering new meanings on top of them. The chord patterns are there, but the chords themselves replaced by sharper sonorities. You get the feel of bebop without the actual notes. The swing of the rhythms go back to the African roots of jazz itself, but underneath, the actual meters sometimes slip and slide. You could call it deconstructed jazz, postmodern jazz, maybe even meta-jazz. Or you could simply think, what if you backed the car up as far as bebop, then took that left turn we missed the first time?

However you justify it, the result is a music lightning-fast yet delicate, difficult to grasp on first hearing yet linear and logical. John’s pianistic speed is not torrential like Bud Powell’s, but evanescent, like flashes of thought. His music has an awful lot of notes, but it is never dense. Harmonic implications are rarely unambiguous, but the chords follow convincingly. Somewhere beneath the surface you can hear bebop, as through a distorting glass. The Esposito regulars he works with here are well chosen to read between his lines: smooth Eric Person on sax, more staccato Greg Glassman on trumpet, both able to match John’s fluid piano filigree; versatile Kenny Davis on bass; and most of all drummer Peter O’Brien, whose articulation of the meter is so understated that you sense more than hear the background structure.

This disc of Esposito compositions, which breaks a regrettably long hiatus in John’s discography, opens, to establish his pedigree, with a piece not far from tradition, and therefore titled Boppin. But in Just Fiends we’re deep in Esposito country, characterized by the unobtrusive ten-beat ostinato, the parallel intervals between the horns, the exotic atmosphere, the melodies that spill over the limits of the repeating rhythmic unit. Across his swing rhythm, John often uses a quasi-classical technique of dividing a measure freely into two, three, four, or five equal notes, and you hear this charmingly displayed in the languid tune of Late November.

The most complex, most “composed” piece is The Blue People, written out in contrapuntal lines through chord structures closer to Bartok or Schoenberg than to Charlie Parker; the nascent atonality is ameliorated by the use of drones and parallel melodies between the horns. Joan is not a typical jazz structure, but a long, languorous ABA melody that Person plays through once, with interpolations. For my money, Musashi is the most ingenious piece. First of all, its opening rhythmic pattern is 11 beats long (eat your heart out, David Brubeck), with a common 4-against-3 feel in the 3/4 measures. Then, a minute or so in, that superimposed rhythm becomes the basis for a metric modulation (tempo change based on a fraction of the original beat) into a faster 4/4 with a Latin dance feel; a second modulation brings the 11/4 back.

After this tour-de-force of modernist erudition, Rhyme seems almost easy, with its “rhythm changes” thickened by a denser harmony; and Fast Ride is an up-tempo, reharmonized blues. All this is not, I hope, to make Esposito’s music sound dauntingly technical, or to deny that it is just as fun to listen to for its conversational qualities, its call and response among these players who have played together or so many years, its uninhibited swing as any fine bebop. But it is an intelligent and theoretically informed breed of jazz. And it will take that kind of intelligence, I think, to rescue jazz from its current illusory cul-de-sac, and open up doors to further exploration.