Live At Grasland

In the mid-'60s, Burton Greene was arguably the leading pianist on the New York free jazz scene, sideman to a long list of downtown luminaries and leader of his own group on two releases for ESP-Disk. Unlike the majority of his peers, however, Greene spent the following decades developing his questing spirit, opening his musical worldview — he became a leader in the klezmer-jazz fusion of the '80s and '90s, and otherwise kept up with new ideas that intrigued him. Therefore, on the live, in-the-studio solo recording Live at Grasland, the 67-year-old Greene plays with at least as much excitement and intelligence as he did 40 years before on a program of originals (save for a haunting rendition of "Angels," a tune by clarinetist Perry Robinson, a longtime musical partner of Greene's) that touch upon all of his influences. The centerpiece of the album, the two-part "South Florida Odyssey Suite," has echoes of Carla Bley's witty musical jokes, and the distinctively Eastern European "In the Footsteps of the Bratslav" shows the pianist-composer's folk influence. However, the more straightforward waltz-time "A Cozy Veggy Soup" recalls Dave Brubeck's similar time-signature experiments, showing that free expression doesn't always have to be "challenging," in the old sense.