From the May 2012 issue of The New York City Jazz Record:

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Pianist Craig Taborn has gigged with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Gerald Cleaver for a number of years, but it took the trio all this time finally to play New York. The late Saturday set at the Village Vanguard (April 7) moved from deep abstraction and stillness to a kind of beat-based pulsing energy, reflecting Taborn’s far-flung influences from Cecil Taylor to Detroit techno. Large stretches were free, but the precision was unmistakable, a key aesthetic ingredient. Taborn and Morgan, immersed in the densest thickets of improvised sound, would launch suddenly into tight unison passages, some of which seemed to stretch the limits of the possible (Morgan’s contorted fingerings belied the elegance of the ideas themselves). Taborn announced no titles, but some of his repertoire for the week, including “American Landscape,” was from the 2001 trio disc Light Made Lighter, though completely reinvented. Newer pieces had working titles like “Chorales” and “Gal 1.” The leader gave his lyrical, reflective side plenty of room to show itself, yet the rhythms were true puzzlers, marked by hypnotic repetition, aggressive attack and exceedingly subtle shifts over time. Seeds of this approach were sown during Taborn’s period with Tim Berne; there are interesting parallels to be drawn with Vijay Iyer’s Accelerando as well. But the trio’s ECM debut — the follow-up to Taborn’s 2011 solo piano stunner Avenging Angel — will likely defy all comparisons when it’s recorded later this year. (David R. Adler)

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It’s always been the case: Kneebody just has to be experienced live. That’s the logic behind the band’s multi-night residencies hosted by Search & Restore. The last of four evenings at Littlefield (April 14) was appropriately festive. Trumpeter Shane Endsley, tenor saxophonist Ben Wendel, keyboardist Adam Benjamin, bassist Kaveh Rastegar and drummer Nate Wood were visibly thrilled to have bassist and singer-songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello as their special guest (previous nights found the band covering music by Tom Zé, Judee Sill and others). But first Kneebody offered a set of its own, playing music from a forthcoming album, including Benjamin’s “Blorp,” which segued into “Unforeseen Influences” from 2010’s You Can Have Your Moment. There’s no exact name for Kneebody’s music — it’s electric jazz, surely, with wall-shaking beats and a phenomenal intricacy typified by “Trite,” with a killer drum intro from Wood, and “Towel Hard,” the blistering final encore. But Ndegeocello’s set brought out another kind of versatility in these players, as they tackled Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Spanish Castle Magic,” and items from Meshell’s 2011 disc Weather including “Dead End,” the P-Funkish “Rapid Fire” and the noir ballad “Crazy and Wild.” Chris Bruce added scratchy Telecaster, and Meshell wielded Fender bass when she wasn’t singing with a rueful tenderness — a sound as hard to pin down as Kneebody itself. (DA)