Mr. Binney is typical of his generation of luminaries. He is ignored by graying critics who wring their hands about the art form’s pending death. And yet when he played the Rubin Museum Art in September, he packed it with fans hungry for his updated acoustic melding of several strains of music from the seventies—pop, jazz-rock fusion and the decade’s turbulent avant-garde. 

It was almost as if Mr. Binney were conjuring up the kind of jazz that would have flowered from that decade onward if record labels hadn’t chosen to champion smooth jazz and young lions instead. These days, the music industry no longer dictates what is or isn’t jazz. That means paltry record sales perhaps. But on nights like this, it’s clear that jazz is in a better place aesthetically than is has been in decades. Listen for yourself. Here are the ten best jazz albums of 2009.

David Binney, Third Occasion (Mythology Records)

Perhaps better than anybody else right now, Mr. Binney balances the adventurous elements of modern jazz with the lyricism of sophisticated pop. You can easily imagine Joni Mitchell singing the tunes on Third Occasion. The saxophonist often plays solos with screeching climaxes. But interestingly enough, he often reaches them when his band members—the pianist Craig Taborn, the bassist Scott Colley and the drummer Brian Blade--are playing the kind of hooks that Walter Becker and Donald Fagan would probably gush about.

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Infernal Machines (New Amsterdam Records)

As the name of his nu big band suggests, the composer-bandleader-blogger Darcy James Argue sees himself as an artistic insurgent. He is a former student of trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, celebrated for his work as an arranger who broke new ground as an arranger for the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra in the sixties and seventies. But Infernal Machines also draws on the minimalism of Steve Reich and the apocalyptic rock and roll of Radiohead. This is also music with a message, a decidedly leftist one. What else would you expect from a Canadian jazz man resettled in Carroll Gardens?

The Linda Oh Trio, Entry (self-released)

Ms. Oh, a youthful Chinese-Malaysian bassist who grew up in Australia, played her first gig as a leader in July at (Le) Poisson Rouge and released Entry, her first album, a few weeks later. The critics swooned, and no wonder. The interplay between Ms. Oh and her trio mates—the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and drummer Obed Calvaire—is surprisingly forceful. Imagine the Red Hot Chili Peppers on a day when Anthony Kedis is on holiday. Ms. Oh’s trio even covers “Soul to Squeeze,” an RHCP b-side.

Joe Martin, Not By Chance (Anzic Records)

The bassist Joe Martin, an unassuming Iowan, has long been one of New York’s busiest sidemen. One his second album as a leader, he has called in two of his occasional employers: the pianist Brad Mehldau and the saxophonist Chris Potter, both of whom are stars in the jazz world, and the talented young drummer Marcus Gilmore. The result is a blowing session by jazz musicians who have rid their playing of any hackneyed jazz-isms. Its profundity lies not so much for its ambition, but for its deep grooves and joyful playing. Mr. Martin also reminds us that he is a gifted composer.

Kurt Rosenwinkel Standards Trio, Reflections (Word of Mouth Music)

On his most recent visit to New York, the guitarist Mr. Rosenwinkel, a Philadelphian who now resides in Germany, performed standards at the Village Vanguard and snuck in an appearance with The Roots on the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon Show. For the latter, search YouTube. For the former, we have Reflections, a ballad album made up of familiar tunes by Thelonius Monk and Wayne Shorter and one of the leader’s beguiling originals, “East Coast Love Affair.” It’s a tad reserved. But nobody makes the electric guitar sings like Mr. Rosenwinkel.

Keith Jarrett, Testament London/Paris (ECM)

The pianist Keith Jarrett, now 64 years old, is playing totally improvised solo concerts again. For that, we should all be thankful. This is Mr. Jarrett’s third live solo recording in four years, and it is another gem. If his early solo excursions like the classic 1975 Koln Concert were distinguished for their youthful ambition and their lyricism, Testament remarkable for its breadth and its darkness. In the London show, Mr. Jarrett serves up Schoenbergian atonality, Mehldau-ian jazz pop and a spontaneous ballad that Leonard Bernstein could have penned for an alternative version of West Side Story.

Ravi Coltrane, Blending Times (Savoy Jazz)

The legendary John Coltrane’s late period work with his wife pianist-harpist Alice Coltrane alternated between the serene and the purposely chaotic. Their son, the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, takes these two seemingly disparate elements and weaves them so tightly together that they become indistinguishable on his latest album. The result is jazz that is free and yet at the same time pastoral. It succeeds not only because Mr. Coltrane is fine saxophonist, but because his quartet, featuring pianist Luis Perdomo, the bassist Drew Gress and the drummer E.J. Strickland, is one of best ensembles in jazz.

Rob Garcia 4, Perennial (Brooklyn Jazz Underground Records)

On some nights, the drummer Rob Garcia plays traditional jazz with filmmaker-clarinetist Woody Allen at the Café Caryle. On others, you can find playing him playing the more gnarly contemporary variety that would make the crowd at the Upper East Side waterhole run for the exits. On Perennial, Mr. Garcia splits this difference between these two extremes. The album sounds a bit like a thoroughly modern version of a Lennie Tristano session from the early fifties. In other words, Mr. Garcia is a thinker. But his music is warm and unpretentious. Perhaps most delightfully, he writes melodies you find yourself humming long after Perennial is over.

John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, Eternal Interlude (Sunnyside Records)

Calling the drummer-composer John Hollenbeck a jazz musician is like referring to Thom Yorke as a mere rock and roll crooner. It seems a rather narrow description for someone with such prodigious talents and ambitions. Mr. Hollenbeck writes pieces for his large ensemble that are almost symphonic. They share a lot with the more ecstatic strains of contemporary classic music, the kind practiced by John Adams and the drummer’s longtime employer, Meredith Monk. And yet if David Binney is a jazz musician then so is Mr. Hollenbeck. They are both reinvigorating the art form with influences from the broader culture. Jazz needs more of this.

Chris  Potter Underground, Ultrahang (ArtistShare)

The saxophonist Chris Potter continues his examination of James Brown and Miles Davis’ electric period on the third album by his modern day fusion quartet. It’s a worthy project. At times, Ultrahang sounds a bit chilly and self-congratulatory, a typical problem with jazz-rock. But songs like “Interstellar Signals” are transcendent. And Mr. Potter’s playing is never less than excellent. No tenor saxophonist has done more better work in the recording studio this year.

It’s hard to pin down the drummer-composer John Hollenbeck stylistically. You can frequently find him playing gigs as a sideman at clubs like the Village Vanguard and the Jazz Standard. This would suggest rather strongly that Mr. Hollenbeck is a jazz musician.

But is he?

“Uh, I can play jazz,” Mr. Hollenbeck said cagily. “I know a lot about jazz.”

He then proceeded to give a definition of jazz that was so expansive that it bordered on meaninglessness. Yes, he was a jazz musician, if what one meant by jazz was music that had improvisation and no vocals, the kind that would fit beneath an umbrella big enough for both traditionalist trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn, even though they might not relish the thought of bumping into each there.

What Mr. Hollenbeck, a slight, bespectacled 41-year-old with a goatee and long sideburns, was trying to say is that he is and isn’t a jazz music.

Back in the ’70s, it was fashionable for musicians to spurn the word “jazz” because they thought it too confining and racist. (Never mind that some of them couldn’t have navigated their way through a chorus of “I’ve Got Rhythm.”)

Mr. Hollenbeck’s unwillingness to call himself a jazz musician is somewhat more admirable. You are just as likely find him behind the drums at the Bang A Can Festival as you are to see him playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the shamanistic singer–choreographer–filmmaker–opera composer Meredith Monk’s ensemble, with whom he has been collaborating for more than a decade. Mr. Hollenbeck speaks of Ms. Monk’s work, which he describes as “folk music from another universe or a country that doesn’t exist,” as an inspiration.

All these strands come together in Mr. Hollenbeck’s own music. The result is jazz, but it isn’t jazz. It is worthy of its own name: post-jazz.

Mr. Hollenbeck will be serving up this aesthetic brew at a Nov. 30 extravaganza at (Le) Poisson Rogue. He will be performing chamber music for violin, vibes and drums, which he recently released on Rainbow Jimmies, one of his two new albums.

He will lead his splendid large ensemble in a performance of compositions from Eternal Interlude, his other new record, which is even better. The John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble looks like a big band. Sometimes it even sounds like one. But to call this a jazz group would be the same as mistaking the pioneering Chicago post-rock group Tortoise for a two-guitar, bass and drums Beatles cover band.

There is more of Steve Reich’s minimalism in Mr. Hollenbeck’s music than Duke Ellington; Ms. Monk’s otherworldly spirit is more present than Thelonius Monk, although the drummer’s “Foreign One” on Eternal Interlude is an artful deconstruction of the mad bebop genius’ “Four in One.”

Sandwiched in between, there will be a set by Future Quest, the Meredith Monk cover band that Mr. Hollenbeck leads with singer Theo Bleckmann. “We play her tunes, but kind of give them … uh, I hate to say it, but a jazz treatment,” Mr. Hollenbeck said, once more wincing at little at the J-word.

Mr. Hollenbeck confessed the inclusion of Future Quest into the line up at (Le) Poisson Rouge was a bit of an afterthought.  He said he had been trying for some time to get a gig there. But the proprietors wanted something really big—not just his large ensemble, but something that would turn the evening into an event.

“I suggested two things,” Mr. Hollenbeck recalled. “They said, ‘How about three? What else is there?’ There is at least one person there who is a Meredith Monk freak. He really wanted this band.

“It’s really new project, and it’s kind of weird,” Mr. Hollenbeck continued. “At first, I did it with singer Theo Bleckmann at Symphony Space for a Meredith Monk tribute thing. Then last year we did it at the Whitney for another Meredith Monk marathon concert. Out of the blue, we got a call to play at a new music festival in Dresden. So it’s something that has a life of its own.”

The son of an IBM employee, Mr. Hollenbeck grew up in Binghamton, N.Y.  You can feel the landscape of upstate New York in his music. Some of Mr. Hollenbeck’s meditative chamber pieces on Rainbow Jimmies were inspired by early morning canoe trips and deer sighting in the Adirondacks.

There are moments in some of his large ensemble works where the composer is groping his way through a dark wilderness. Then shafts of light reach down from the heavens. Suddenly, it is the sonic equivalent of one of Thomas Cole’s mystical Catskills paintings.

Mr. Hollenbeck studied classic percussion and jazz composition at Eastman School of Music in Rochester. He moved to New York City to play jazz, and was drawn to the downtown music scene, where jazz rebels like John Zorn rubbed shoulders with new music iconoclasts like Ms. Monk.

Pretty soon, Mr. Hollenbeck found himself playing with the singer’s ensemble. He’s been with her for 11 years.

In an interview with The Observer, Ms. Monk praised her percussionist as “one of the great musicians of our time.” But she admitted she had issues with some of his arrangements of her pieces. It’s not that she doesn’t like jazz; it’s more that she is a kindred postmodernist.

“What I like about John’s music is he comes from both a classical and a jazz background,” Ms. Monk said. “What I love in his arrangements of my music is when you don’t know if it is jazz or classical. You know, that ambiguity? But when it turns into more of a standard jazz structure with the solos and everything, that’s when I wasn’t really happy about it.”

Ms. Monk, who plans to attend the show at (Le) Poisson Rouge, said she discussed her misgivings with Mr. Hollenbeck after hearing Future Quest at the Whitney. Since then, the drummer has fixed the problem. “I think my music also has that quality where you are not sure if it’s in a particular genre,” Ms. Monk said. “He understood exactly what I was talking about.”

editorial@observer.com

Once the doors open and Ms. Schneider’s admirers are seated and served drinks, the scene unfolds. The 21 members of her ensemble drift in. The bandleader-composer employs some of the best jazz musicians in New York, many of whom have become stars in their own right because of their association with her. Why, there’s Ingrid Jensen, the beanpole of a trumpeter, who who is known for her lyrical playing. Here comes Donny McCaslin, the tenor saxophonist with the high forehead of a Protestant minster, who can always be counted on blow the lights out.

There may be celebrities from outside the jazz world in the house, too. Two years ago, I spotted David Bowie looking princely where he sat in the back of the room with his wife, Iman, on opening night. David Byrne and Simon Rattle, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, have stopped by to see what the fuss was about.

Then Ms. Schneider arrives and instantly transforms the basement jazz club into her living room. She turns 49 on Nov. 27. But she is still girlish and radiant in a black sleeveless dress. She tries to make her way to the stage only to be stopped by fans. Some of them have underwritten the production costs of her last two albums though contributions to her Web site. Others probably feel they know her from watching the video clips there might be bundled up and sold someday on DVD as the Maria Schneider Reality Show if her popularity continues to surge at its present rate.

She reaches her destination and waves her arms. The audience is bathed in warm and seductive music. What Ms. Schneider composes is unquestionably jazz. But there is a lot of Maurice Ravel in there, a lot of flamenco and Brazilian music. She loves Jimmy Webb’s soaring anthems for the Fifth Dimension, like “Up, Up and Away.” It makes sense. She, too, wants to transport her audience. That’s why Ms. Schneider has become a phenomenon.

There is nothing like hearing her orchestra at the Jazz Standard, where she has recorded an excellent live album and where she has held forth on Thanksgiving Week for the past five years.

“It’s really fun,” Ms. Schneider said in a recent interview at her Upper West Side apartment. “It’s almost become a social occasion. It’s like a reunion or something at this point. I’m always sorry when it’s over. Last year, they talked about having us do it for two weeks, but that might be a bit much. It might lose some of its freshness.”

On this particular morning, Ms. Schneider was composing. She was dressed appropriately in a gray fleece top, black sweatpants and white sneaks. There was sheet music on her upright piano and more on the work table nearby. She recently did something new; she asked her fans on the Internet to commission four new works. A guy in France immediately snapped them all up.

Now Ms. Schneider had to deliver. She hoped to premier one at the Standard. But it hadn’t been going very well. “Hopefully, it will go O.K.,” Ms. Schneider said nervously. “It has some problems.”

Most jazz musicians—well, okay, male jazz musicians in particular—wouldn’t admit such fear on the eve of an important gig. But Mr. Schneider isn’t the bashful sort. She single-highhandedly rejuvenated the big-band genre, which fell into self-parody in the ’70s.

“You know, I got sick of big-band cliches,” Ms. Schneider said. “I found it to be not a very expressive idiom. Yet I loved my group, my players. So what I tried to do was figure out how to put more air and space into the thing and figure out how to create lightness and a variety of textures and sounds. I wanted to drop the template that had been branded into our brains, not only about big band but about jazz.”

Darcy James Argues, the 34-year-old big-band leader and one of her spiritual heirs, said the impact of Mr. Schneider’s work on his generation of composers was incalculable.

“I always say that Maria’s first record, Evanescence, is comparable in impact to The Velvet Underground and Nico—everyone who heard it started a big band,” Mr. Argue said in an email. “And it wasn’t just that her debut sounded different from most big band records—it sounded unlike anything happening in jazz at the time.”

Ms. Schneider was also one of the first jazz musicians to harness the power of the Internet. She signed up early on with ArtistShare, the company that came up with an innovative idea to enable jazz players to fund their work through fan donations. Her first ArtistShare release, Concert in the Garden, won a Grammy Award for best big-band jazz album in 2005. It was the first album sold exclusively on the Internet to win the award.

What’s more, Ms. Schneider has forged a deep bond with her fans through her Web site. She has discovered that they don’t particularly want MP3s or streams of her music. They want CDs with extensive liner notes and sumptuous photographs of Ms. Schneider at work. In short, they want as much of Ms. Schneider as she is willing to give.

The bandleader is more generous with herself than the average jazz musician would be. If you buy her records, you get access to videos of her rehearsals and recording sessions with all their embarrassing flubs. There is even a photo in which Ms. Schneider can be seen cleaning her toilet to avoid composing. One can hardly imagine Miles Davis sharing such an intimate moment. You start to wonder: Does this woman have a private life?

“I make a large part of my living now through that Web site,” Mr. Schneider explained. “Yeah, it’s work and it should be. I don’t want to just take people’s money and say, ‘Oh, help me make my music because my music is good.’ No, people should get something in return. They should get a high-quality documentation of my humiliation.”

It was a good line. We both laughed. “You better at least say that I started laughing after I said that,” the composer pleaded.

Somehow, it isn’t as embarrassing to watch Ms. Schneider clean the john as you might think. She is a perfect realty show protagonist: the amiable woman from a small town in Minnesota who is terrified when she must present a new piece to her band. This is as challenging as anything anybody does on Project Runway or Ace of Cakes. You want to root for her.

Ms. Schneider knows we are out there cheering.

“I liken it to be being a runner in a race,” she said. “You feel all these people by the side of the road. You don’t know who they are, but they are going, ‘Yeah, go, go-go-go!’ People are encouraging you, but they are also expecting something. I don’t want to disappoint anybody. It raises the bar for me.”

editorial@observer.com

But Mr. O’Farrill, a cherubic 48-year-old pianist-composer who was dressed casually in a black turtleneck, black slacks and white sneakers, played as if the house was full. He attempted a dangerously up-tempo rendition of “Lullaby of Birdland.”

His hands flew around the keyboard. He grunted as if he were moving his instrument rather than playing it, stuffing the familiar standard with impressionist musings and flashy virtuosity. It was a triumph of will rather than artistry. But Mr. O’Farrill pulled it off.

It was also an apt metaphor for the latest chapter in his career. Three years ago, Mr. O’Farrill and his 19-piece Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra marched out of Jazz at Lincoln Center in a huff and settled uptown at Symphony Space. On Nov. 5 and 6, he and his cohorts will begin their third season in exile, and they will be playing a program that is overstuffed as his version of “Lullaby of Birdland.”

In an interview at Puppets, Mr. O’Farrill described Friday night’s set list, which is to be repeated Saturday, in appropriwately Barnum-esque terms. The orchestras will premier “Wise Latina Woman,” a tribute to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, commissioned by Symphony Space and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. “We have had Latinos in the highest level of the White House, but we have not had a Latino in the highest court,” he said. “For it to be a Latino and a woman—a Latina—is just amazing to me. It gave me a lot of hope.”

The Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra will perform works by Bob Franceschini; Ray Santos; Mr. O’Farrill’s father, the late Chico O’Farrill, the unsung composer-arranger who wrote for Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie; and the pianist’s 15-year-old son, Adam. “I don’t know how we are going to get to all this stuff,” Mr. O’Farrill confessed. “Something may be struck from the program.”

And Randy Weston, the 83-year-old pianist-composer whom Mr. O’Farrill calls “the walking embodiment of spirit of jazz,” will make a guest appearance with the ensemble. Mr. O’Farrill said that he has gone out of his way to be inclusive. It is undoubtedly intended as a shot at his former employer.

Mr. O’Farrill had to worry about filling enough seats in Symphony Space’s 756-seat Peter Jay Sharpe Theater to not lose money. That was not a sure thing in a recession. “It is an unbelievable struggle,” he said of his post–Lincoln Center existence.

Still, he said he has no regrets: “The other day as I was walking out of the hours, I said to my wife, ‘You know how hurt I used to be when we were at Jazz at Lincoln Center? They took one photograph of us in six years.’”

The story of O’Farrill’s abbreviated residency at Lincoln Center is a cautionary tale about the politics of cultural institutions. It started in the early ’90s when Jazz at Lincoln Center’s newly appointed artistic director, the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, set out to redefine the art form.

Most people remember Mr. Marsalis’ Sistah Soulja moment when he let it be known that synth-wielding fusion purveyors and Black Nationalist honkers and screamers would not be getting any gigs at his new home. But around the same time, Mr. Marsalis also declared that Afro-Hispanic rhythms were as important to jazz as swing and the blues. It was perhaps the first formal reorganization by a major institution that Latin jazz wasn’t an offshoot of the music; it was an integral part of the tradition.

Mr. Marsalis recruited Mr. O’Farrill, who directed a band that played his father’s music, to teach the Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra how to play Latin jazz and ultimately asked him in 2002 to lead his own big band under the institution’s banner. Mr. O’Farrill instantly became the figurehead of an entire genre of jazz.

It wasn’t long, however, before Jazz at Lincoln Center decided it couldn’t afford two orchestras. One of them was going to get more resources—the one led by Mr. Marsalis, without whom Jazz at Lincoln Center probably wouldn’t exist.

Mr. O’Farrill departed, complaining that he had been unjustifiably treated.

He says that his treatment at Lincoln Center is just another example of how Latin jazz has been systematically excluded from the jazz canon. “Ken Burns did 12 episodes,” Mr. O’Farrill fumed. “He didn’t mention Latin jazz. That’s always been the case in our history. The people who tell our history are not the ones who make it.”

Adrian Ellis, executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, disagreed. “When future seasons were planned back in 2006, a mutual decision was made for the [Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra] to continue as an independent entity, allowing the group the expansion and flexibility it deserved,” he said in an email. “We continue to be grateful to Arturo for his leadership and artistic vision and we wish the ALJO success in their season at Symphony Space.”

Mr. O’Farrill infers that if you support his Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, you are striking a blow against the cultural gatekeepers at Lincoln Center and PBS. That argument is probably a little too convenient. Yes, his father was tragically overlooked by jazz critics. But today, that kind of Latin jazz—not just the kind that draws from Cuba and Puerto, but the non-English-speaking Americas—is not only flourishing, it is part of the jazz mainstream.

It is surely a grind to fill the Peter Jay Sharpe Theater. But who would have expected the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra to survive for even three years outside of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s hothouse? That is a testament to Mr. O’Farrill’s charisma and willpower. The band’s most recent album, Song for Chico, won a Grammy. And Mr. O’Farrill is starting to tour internationally with his big band.

Next month, Mr. O’Farrill brings his Latin Jazz All Star Sextet to Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s pricey nightclub. He neglects to mention that in our interview. Better to emphasize the struggle at Symphony Space. Jazz at Lincoln Center can sell its own tickets.

editorial@observer.com

“If I was 20 years younger, I would seriously consider moving back to France,” he railed in his column in The Note, a thrice yearly jazz magazine published by a local state college. “Our country seems to have lost its way completely.”

The neighbors don’t begrudge the curmudgeonly septuagenarian jazz great his complaints. What about the time he marched onto the nearby golf club tooting his saxophone after he’d been drinking to protest the carts zipping past his house at 6 a.m.? Luckily, the state trooper who showed up to investigate was a fan.

But then, most of the locals are. Mr. Woods settled here in 1976 after he returned to the United States from five years of self-imposed exile in Europe. The town had a wonderfully rustic jazz club called the Deer Head Inn. Mr. Woods had jammed there in the ’50s after straight gigs at a nearby lodge, where people came to listen to, as he puts it, “Jerry Vale or whatever Italian singer was in fashion at that moment.” The hills were full of old jazz men. After all, it’s only an hour’s drive from New York.

Mr. Woods started an annual jazz festival and a summer jazz camp, both of which are now institutions. The saxophonist also formed a quintet comprised of his fellow mountain dwellers. They toured the world and spread the news that the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania were alive not just with kitschy resorts famed for their heart-shaped hot tubs, but some very hip music.

The saxophonist, who has been voted best alto player 30 times in the last 32 years by Down Beat readers, is still at it. He and his merry men have taken up residence at Birdland this week through Saturday night. If you haven’t heard Mr. Woods live, you have missed something extraordinary. He has an unbelievably fat sound. Sometimes, he can be a tad glib, tossing off licks and crowd-pleasing quotes from other songs instead of true improvisations.

But having seen Mr. Woods five times in the past 25 years, I can solemnly swear that he always brings the house down. Hearing Mr. Woods play a ballad like Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg’s “Last Night When We Were Young” on his quintet’s sparkling 2007 release, American Songbook II, is like hearing Pavarotti sing “E Lucevan Le Stelle” from Puccini’s Tosca. The saxophonist unlocks more pain and disillusionment than the composers probably imagined from their torch song about transitory love. It’s a defiantly beautiful performance.

Mr. Woods’ lament about stolen firewood is a metaphor of sorts. The world is changing faster than he likes. There was a time when we were surrounded by musicians of his generation who worked the same magic with the Great American Songbook. Now they are vanishing.

Mr. Woods, who turns 78 in November, would be the first to tell you that he won’t be doing it indefinitely, either. His years of smoking and drinking have caught up with him. When The Observer visited him at his house on an overcast October day, he was huffing steroids through an inhaler. His oxygen machine throbbed nearby.

“I think emphysema is nature’s way of saying you’ve been playing too many notes,” Mr. Woods conceded. “I mean whether you have an infirmity or not, growing old in an art form, you try to reduce it to its most basic elements.”

“I can still play,” he added. “I can still breathe. I mean, my lungs are like leather.”

Indeed, Mr. Woods, who looks like a hipster version of Joseph Stalin with his gray scrub-brush mustache, was in good spirits. He is regularly interviewed by European reporters, like the German camera crew that recently paid him a visit. But a writer from a New York City paper? It had been a while. The old bebopper was tickled.

Any jazz critic enters Mr. Woods’ house with trepidation. The reed man is famous for lashing out at reporters who probed him about his complicated relationship with the late Charlie Parker. Earlier on, Mr. Woods was praised for being one of the most slavish disciples of the bebop master, whom the younger saxophonist befriended as a teenager in the late ’40s.

But after Mr. Parker died in 1955, the critics began searching for the new thing. Then even some of Mr. Woods’ former admirers dismissed him as a copycat. Mr. Woods gave them ammunition by marrying Parker’s window, Chan, in 1957. That Mr. Woods is white didn’t help, either.

For years, he refused to discuss his ex-wife, to whom he was married for 17 years.

“They always leave off the fact that we were in love,” he said shaking his head at the absurdity of it all. “[It was] Art Pepper [an alto-playing rival] who said, ‘He’s a fan of Charlie Parker’s. He’s such a fan that when Bird died, Phil Woods got ahold of Chan, Charlie Parker’s ex-wife.’ He apologized later. That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. He knew me better than that. Am I that shallow? Of course, I was smitten with the fact that she was Charlie Parker’s widow. But we did fall in love. At the time, we needed each other, and it worked out.”

Ms. Parker, for her part, wrote with great affection about Mr. Woods in her 1993 memoir, My Life in E-Flat, although she confessed that she found him to be something of a “whiner.” They made quite a couple in the ’60s. Mr. Woods looked the sort of mustachioed outsider whom Jack Nicholson would have played to great effect in a movie with a Robert Towne script. Ms. Parker exuded a similar edgy glamour, with her Jean Seberg ’do. Maybe they were too perfect to last.

Over the years, Mr. Woods’ adulation for Mr. Parker became much less of a liability. The truth is, many of the greatest jazz players are not innovators like Charlie Parker (really, how many Birds can there be?) but refiners like Mr. Woods. They legitimize the masters. For what is a prophet without disciples? And Mr. Woods spent so much time in Parker’s robes that they became his own.

Mr. Woods was looking forward to his week in New York. He and his third wife, Jill Goodwin, used to head home every night after his gigs in the city. Now they prefer not to drive at night. So they will stay at the Marriott Marquis, that Times Square tourist beehive. He could tell them stories.

“I hung out with Jack Kerouac, man,” Mr. Woods said. “I saw Bird drinking with Dylan Thomas at the bar in the village. I went to jam sessions at Larry River’s pad. I remember seeing Bird playing Larry’s baritone sax.”

Mr. Woods started to laugh. “I mean, ‘WOW!’ There was magic in the air.”

There still is a bit; catch it while you can.

editorial@observer.com

Ms. Oh’s parents were overjoyed when her sisters became doctors. They were mortified when their youngest daughter told them she wanted to pursue a career as a jazz musician.

“They were like, ‘No, you are not doing it. Don’t even think about it,’” said Ms. Oh, a petite 25-year-old with long black hair parted slightly off-center. “Then it became, ‘O.K., you are doing it, but you have to be a teacher. You can get a music education degree.’ Which I never did.”

This prompted a mischievous laugh. But her mother and father need not have worried: Their daughter is an unqualified success. In August, Ms. Oh played a gig as a leader at the increasingly indispensable West Village club (Le) Poisson Rouge. The New York Times’ Ben Ratliff was in the house. He riffed ecstatically that her music was “smart and informed and hard working, full of real improvisation, the committed hard-won, lumpy, nontechnical, go-for broke kind.”

It isn’t every day you hear jazz celebrated in terms usually reserved for crème of wheat. It was obvious that Mr. Ratliff, a writer of impeccable taste, was smitten.

Shortly thereafter, Ms. Oh released Entry, her first album. NPR’s Josh Jackson was reminded not of a sumptuous breakfast, but of a fascinating chemistry experiment. He wrote on the NPR Web site that Ms. Oh crafted “music that grows like cellular cultures on an agar plate of rich, vampy nutrient.”

It was remarkable to read such rapturous prose about a musician who only arrived in New York three years ago from Perth, still a little wet behind the ears. Until last year, Ms. Oh was a graduate student at Manhattan School of Music.

But Ms. Oh deserves it. She has made a marvelous first album. And she is subtly advancing the cause of women in jazz—even though she professed in a recent interview over dinner at a Chelsea restaurant that she found the issue of gender politics in jazz rather tiresome.

“I really feel that women in jazz is the same thing as race in jazz,” she said. “If people just forgot about it and listened to the music, then everything would be cool.”

Of course, this is wishful thinking. Though women have been essential to the jazz movement since the days of Bessie Smith, nearly a century later, men still dominate the jazz world. They have innumerable jokes about female singers. (“How many chick singers does it take to sing ‘My Funny Valentine?’ Probably all of them.”)

And that’s the humor reserved for female vocalists, who have always been prized in the jazz world. The contempt for women instrumentalists is more acute. One male jazz bass player, reflecting a common attitude, told me that his female counterparts owe their careers to “horny old bandleaders.”

But bring up Ms. Oh with these same late-night sages, and it’s clear that their attitudes are starting to change. They don’t relish the idea of competing for gigs with someone who looks as fetching in a cocktail dress as Ms. Oh does. But they admit—albeit a tad grudgingly—that she is their equal.

Ms. Oh first came to the United States in 2004 as a member of the now defunct International Association of Jazz Education’s Sisters in Jazz program.

“There was a time when I was into the whole promoting-women-in-jazz thing,” Ms. Oh said. “I mean, it’s helped me out a lot. I wouldn’t be here without Sisters in Jazz. Or maybe it would have taken me a lot longer.”

Ms. Oh played the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., with an all-female jazz quintet. But she grew weary of this scene. Too often, she felt that her female peers weren’t good enough. She also found it dispiriting that audiences at women’s jazz events didn’t seem to care.

“I did a gig once where the music was so bad, but the people were clapping,” Ms. Oh said disgustedly. “I was like, ‘This person can’t even play her own instrument, but the people were clapping.’ I was like, ‘This person can’t even play her own instrument, you know?’”

Not that it was easy for her to win acceptance with men. Male jazz musicians approached her at jam sessions and told her no one would hire her because she was an Asian woman. Others told her she needed to work on her attitude.

Her attitude? Ms. Oh couldn’t be a more congenial dinner companion. It turns out these dispensers of unhelpful advice thought she was too polite to make it in New York. Which was just another way of saying she was too Asian and too female.

Still, Ms. Oh found that for the most part, she preferred to play with men. “I have some favorite female musicians, but most of my favorite musicians to play with are men,” she said.

In New York, there are even enough good bass players to go around. Guys like trombonist Slide Hampton and saxophonist Joel Frahm started calling her for gigs. These gigs make Linda Oh feel she’s getting somewhere.

But she is a leader at heart. You can tell by listening to Entry. Usually, jazz musicians make timorous debut albums, petitions for approval from their betters. There is the requisite Wayne Shorter tune, a few standards, a song with a Latin groove and then—perhaps—a real original, almost snuck in among the flattery.

Ms. Oh decided to dispense with all that and record an album of original tunes and a cover of a Red Hot Chili Peppers B-side with a rarely used combination of instruments: bass, trumpet and drums.

There is a reason such trios are rarely heard. The results are often predictable—lots of windy trumpet excursions followed by obligatory bass and drum solos while the brass player rests his weary chops.

Ms. Oh and her bandmates—trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and drummer Obed Calvaire—don’t fall into this trap. Mr. Akinmusire has iron chops and an endless flow of ideas, many of which emanate from left field. Mr. Calvaire has a way of playing only what really matters and implying the rest, leaving plenty of space for his musical co-conspirators.

Then there is Ms. Oh. She floats back and forth between playing traditional bass lines and engaging in a dialogue with Mr. Akinmusire. Sometimes, she even strums her big instrument like a guitar. And as NPR’s Mr. Jackson points out in somewhat more scientific terms, she writes a nice tune.

No record company would put Entry out. So Ms. Oh did so herself.

“I think record labels are afraid to do anything where they won’t have any say,” she said. “And I didn’t really want them to have any say.”

There’s that mischievous laugh again. Soon, she was headed off to Australia with her band. One of their stops was the Perth Jazz Festival. Her parents already had their tickets.

editorial@observer.com

So begins the tale the jazz faithful tell about the birth of jazz piano playing: That it began with Johnson’s reinterpretation of the rollicking two-handed style of his elders, which became known as Harlem stride, the earliest form of jazz piano.

You don’t hear Johnson’s music much anymore, but there is a group of stride pianists in New York who gather regularly to play in the style of that era. One of them is Spike Wilner, who is also one of the owners of Small’s, the basement jazz club on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. He is an intense guy with dark curly hair who traces his ancestry back to a prominent 19th-century European rabbinical dynasty.

In February, Mr. Wilner and his fellow stride enthusiasts discovered that Mr. Johnson lay in an unmarked grave in a Queens cemetery.

“We were all pretty appalled,” Mr. Wilner said. “For him to be in an unmarked pauper’s grave somewhere in Queens is just beyond reprehensible.”

AS A YOUNG pianist, Johnson idolized ragtime piano “ticklers” who played for tips in such establishments and did some pimping on the side.

“They were popular fellows, real celebrities,” he recalled in an interview two years before his death, in 1955. “They had lots of girlfriends, led a sporting life and were invited everywhere there was a piano. I thought it was a fine way to live, just as later kids would think singers like Crosby or Sinatra were worth copying.”

He also artfully varied his melodies and his rhythms. He was an improviser. The ticklers didn’t do that.

He quickly became an uptown sensation. He made classic records in the ’20s for labels like Okeh and Black Swan. He roamed the city with younger disciples like Duke Ellington and Fats Waller. They, too, were welcome anywhere there was a piano and frequently performed at Harlem’s legendary “rent parties,” where residents invited guests to their homes and charged admission so they could keep the wolf from the door.

Johnson, who cradled a cigar in the corner of his mouth while he played, influenced everybody who played his instrument until the advent of bebop in the 1940s. Then pianists started competing directly with horn players, and their art became a right-handed game. Even then, Thelonius Monk tossed some of the old master’s ferocious two-handed licks into his abstract solos.

Johnson also influenced classical white composers like George Gershwin and Darius Milhaud. But when he wrote his own perfectly respectable orchestral music, it was almost as if he didn’t exist.

“He didn’t get a fair shake because of institutional racism,” lamented Ethan Iverson, the pianist in The Bad Plus, a jazz trio known for treatment of Nirvana and Heart songs. He, too, is a rabid Johnson fan.

Some think the Harlem pianist he was the inspiration for Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man. If so,these are outrageous epitaphs for a genius.

After getting the approval of the late pianist’s heirs, Mr. Wilner set out to give Johnson’s ghost some peace. So he has planned an event at his club entitled “James P. Johnson’s Last Rent Party” for Oct. 4 to raise money to buy a headstone for the father of jazz piano. It will feature performances by 10 pianists ranging from Dick Hyman, the distinguished early jazz expert whose lovely solos are heard in classic Woody Allen films like Stardust Memories and Hannah and Her Sisters, to Mr. Iverson, the enfant terrible of the young jazz piano set.

There are too many jazz tributes in New York this fall. Next month, Birdland hosts its 10th annual Django Reinhardt festival. Iridium has scheduled tributes to Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey and Jaco Pastorius over the next three months. These stars may be long gone, but they are still bankable. Whatever happened to developing new talent?

The Small’s Rent Party is different. Mr. Wilner had little trouble filling the bill with great pianists who offered their services for free. Some of these other departed jazz greats may have led tragic lives. But at least they had proper burials.

It’s telling that some of the pianists who will pay tribute to him at Small’s sound a bit apprehensive about performing his music. Mr. Wilner, who is 43, was steeling himself to play the master’s “Carolina Shout,” which Mr. Ellington learned note for note from a player piano roll to prove himself a cutting-edge player.

“It’s a very tricky piece to play,” Mr. Wilner said. “You are really thinking like a drummer because with your left hand, you have a constant steady 4/4 going, and with your right hand, you are playing a syncopated rhythm, and it’s a sophisticated, multipart piece. You have seven or eight different sections. It starts in G and ends up in C. It’s like all the styles of [stride piano] are represented here. “

“I’ll probably be nervous as hell playing it in front of all those piano players,” he added. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”

Mr. Iverson, 35, was practicing Mr. Johnson’s “A Flat Dream.” “I’m not really a really great stride pianist,” he confessed. “That is the understatement of the year. But it’s not how well I’m compared to guys like Dick Hyman. It’s just a short set, but I want to pay homage and think about James P. that day, and getting him a fucking headstone, for Christ’s sake!”

Mr. Hyman, who actually met Mr. Johnson and sat in with his band decades ago, was considering the challenge of being the last batter in the lineup of this seven-and-a-half-hour event that begins at 1:30 p.m. and stretches into the evening. “I’m going to try some of the lesser-known things because with a program of 10 guys before me, I don’t want to be repeating whatever they played,” he said.

The esteemed 81-year-old pianist, who has recorded more then 100 albums under his own name, planned to play some of Mr. Johnson’s ambitious concert works like Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody and Jazzamine Concerto. He will also play four-handed versions of some of Mr. Johnson’s tunes with the pianist Ted Rosenthal.

In other words, these guys will all be pushing each other. This is the way Mr. Johnson would have wanted it. He was the king of the New York piano players. He kept his crown until Art Tatum, a pianist with superhuman technique, arrived from Toledo, Ohio, and cut Mr. Johnson, Mr. Waller and a third New York stride legend, Willie “The Lion” Smith, in a fabled 1933 competition.

Even after that, Mr. Johnson never stopped believing he and his fellow New Yorkers were a cut above the rest of them.

“The other sections of the country never developed the piano as far as the New York boys did,” he sniffed in 1952. “Only lately have they caught up.”

editorial@observer.com

Then there was the time Mr. Martin was called to see if he’d perform Christmas carols on Good Morning America with a Sing Along with Mitch–style male chorus. He would also have to wear garish red shirt.

“I was like, ‘Wow, this sounds like it could be potentially embarrassing,’” Mr. Martin said.

Miles Davis would have responded with one of his famous vulgarity-laced tirades. Mr. Martin just asked the caller to double his fee. National embarrassment has its compensations, it turns out.

Mr. Martin, a 38-year-old Iowa native, tells these tales without a trace of the self-lacerating wit that you often hear from jazz musicians whose careers haven’t lived up to their high-school dreams. He isn’t ashamed of the fact that not all of his gigs have been at the Village Vanguard.

“My primary occupation as a jazz musician, if you want to call it that, is as a sideman,” Mr. Martin said in recent interview at his Fort Greene apartment. “That’s how I earn most of my living, and I keep pretty busy doing that.”

Sometimes that has meant enduring sour notes and soused patrons. But it has also led to supporting roles with stars like pianist Brad Mehldau, saxophonist Chris Potter and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, whose faces have been featured on the covers of jazz magazines here and abroad. In other words, there’s still enough magic to go around.

And almost enough of Mr. Martin. It seems someone is always calling him and asking him to show up with his rather large instrument, which he’d parked temporarily on the landing outside his second-floor apartment after returning at 1 a.m. from a gig at the Bar Next Door in Greenwich Village to back up saxophonist Joel Frahm; he’d only have to lug it out again to return there the same night to play with guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg. Now he was taking an assignment in between.

“One of the reasons I became a bass player was, you are kind of behind the scenes in a way,” he said. “I think that just kind of fits my personality to a certain extent. I’m more comfortable in that role than being out front. I’m a pretty reserved person.”

We should check back in with Mr. Martin soon. Earlier this month, Anzic Records released Not by Chance, Mr. Martin’s second album as a leader. It features two of his periodic employers—Mr. Mehldau and Mr. Potter—along with the phenomenal young drummer Marcus Gilmore. The bassist will be celebrating its release on Oct. 7 and 8 at the Jazz Standard. (The saxophonist Mark Turner will substitute for Mr. Potter at the Jazz Standard.)

Not by Chance has received significant praise and deservedly so. It is, quite simply, one of the year’s best records. One of the pleasures it offers is the opportunity to hear Mr. Martin and his high-profile session mates swap roles. Mr. Mehldau and Mr. Potter play as if they are on holiday from their usual leadership duties, turning in performances that are more carefree and spontaneous than their own recent records.

“It’s nice not to have to worry about the details for once,” Mr. Potter said in an email.

And Mr. Martin turns out to be a surprisingly effective leader. His songs have bass lines that are often as haunting as the gorgeous melodies that float above them. He also knows how to bring them to life.

This he has learned from his countless gigs as a sideman—and not just the prestigious ones he lists on his Web site, joemartinbass.com. He has often played with leaders who try to script too much of what happens on the bandstand. The bassist feels this is unnecessary with musicians like the ones on Not by Chance. He leaves plenty of space so that his sidemen can add their own flourishes, not just in the solo passages, but in the themes of his tunes.

Mr. Potter goes even further than that on the track “Cache,” a spirited samba on which he and Mr. Mehldau exchange hunks of notes with the speed and precision of champion tennis players swatting a ball across the net in a critical match. At the end of their volley, Mr. Potter gets carried away and swoops into his horn’s upper register, where he plays much of the song’s melody.

The saxophonist, a brilliant technician, doesn’t execute it perfectly. There is even an instant where Mr. Potter sounds as if he will lose control of his instrument. But this Icarus-like event only makes the conclusion of “Cache” more satisfying. Mr. Martin confessed that he was as surprised as the rest of us when it happened in the studio.

He also believes in creating “openness” in his music. This can be heard best on the opening track, “Semente.” Mr. Martin begins the song himself with a hypnotic bass line that is clearly 5/4. However, once the rest of the band enters, it’s difficult to tell where one bar ends and another begins. The musicians know, but nobody is keeping the time. “Semente” floats along on its own. The effect is mesmerizing.

Mr. Martin sounded pleasantly surprised by the positive press that Not by Chance has earned. “If you are just doing sideman stuff all the time, you are always giving up a little bit of yourself to play someone else’s music,” he said. “I really enjoy that, wearing different hats. But there is also part of me that doesn’t get to express everything, especially as a composer.”

At the same time, the bassist didn’t entirely welcome the scrutiny that goes along with having his name at the top of the bill.

“I feel more vulnerable as a leader than as a sideman,” Mr. Martin admitted.

In a city of people who are dying for attention, jazz musicians have to watch themselves. There are so many players and so few gigs. It can be dangerous to the men and women who play this music to expect too much. And someone will always call Mr. Martin with a gig.

But some kind of New York magic is pushing him into the limelight. He’s not certain what it is. The only thing he can be sure of is that it’s there.

“Yeah, who knows?” Mr. Martin said with a smile. “I’m either forcing myself or allowing myself to be forced out from the back of the bandstand.”

editorial@observer.com

“I realize that so many of the records I love are from the Seventies,” Mr. Binney wrote in a post he dashed off for his Web site, davidbinney.com. “This because I was a kid growing up then and this was the music that made me want to play music. But it’s not only that, and I don’t really think this is a bias as I have had major discussions about that but … I think the Seventies were the greatest period of creativity in the arts and especially the arts in the U.S.”

He listed 92 albums from the decade that had “an impact” on him. Mr. Binney included predictable gems by Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner. But scattered among them were surprises like Joni Mitchell’s Hejira and Rickie Lee Jones’ Pirates. “THIS JUST A PARTIAL LIST,” Mr. Binney added. “Really just off the top of my head. There are SOOO many more albums I could include if I was home and could look at my collection.”

Mr. Binney’s affection for the decade and its more lyrical pop stylists helps explain what sets him apart from his peers. Like many other jazz musicians who are his age or younger, the saxophonist, who recently turned 48, has an encyclopedic iPod playlist.

But Mr. Binney’s influences are too subtle, too serious, to result in predictable “unpredictable” Björk covers designed to attract applause for witty eclecticism. The Wayne Shorter and the Joni Mitchell and everything else become more than the sum of their parts—they become, distinctly, the work of David Binney. It would be difficult to point to references to Hejira or Pirates in Mr. Binney’s compositions. But you can hear echoes of Ms. Mitchell’s confessions and Ms. Jones’ beatnik tales. There is a haunting, melodic quality in the saxophonist’s songs that isn’t heard enough in jazz.

Mr. Binney doesn’t stop there. He fills his tunes with simple repeated lines that Brill Building denizens would adore. “I’ve always loved really strong hooks,” he told me. “The music I really remember in my life has hooks even if it’s not considered a hook.”

He sang the famous four-note line from John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”

“That’s a huge simple hook,” he says.

True enough. But have you ever heard Cecil Taylor use that word? Mr. Binney is here committing a major diction error in the language of jazz-talk.

There is nothing smooth about his jazz. Mr. Binney has discovered one of the great truths of jazz: If once you have seduced your audience, you can get away with anything. Louis Armstrong knew this. So did Miles Davis and Charles Mingus.

“It’s amazing what you can do after you give people a strong melody,” Mr. Binney said with a laugh. “You can freak out and go crazy. But if you start with the freakout, sometimes you will lose them. I think about that a lot. I want people to like my music. I like it better that way, too.” 

Jazz would have a vast listenership today if more people thought about this as much as he.

MR. BINNEY BRINGS an all-star quartet featuring drummer Brian Blade, pianist Craig Taborn and the Norwegian bassist Eivind Opsvik to Rubin Museum of Art at 150 West 17th Street on Sept. 25 at 7 p.m. They will play songs from his splendid new CD, Third Occasion, which features a four-piece brass section. The concert is part of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem’s fine series of Friday night shows at the Rubin dubbed “Harlem in the Himalayas.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Mr. Binney said as he demolished a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich at a diner near his apartment recently. “I was thinking about doing it with the brass like on this new record. Blade suggested it. But I don’t know if I can get that together economically. But I may do it that way. It would be cool, I think.”

He is a bantamweight guy with thinning black hair. He grew up in Southern California and was kicked out of his high-school marching band. He came to New York when he was 19, determined to have a career as a jazz musician. He admits he was shy. That will always be a drawback in New York. Mr. Binney would forget tunes on stage. He didn’t sign big-label deals like so many of his friends in the days when the major labels still cared about jazz.

But Mr. Binney says this only made him fight harder. He still doesn’t feel like he has gotten the attention he deserves from the media, particularly the critics at The New York Times. In 2006, a Down Beat critic gave Out of Airplanes, one of his finest albums, a tepid three and a half stars, and sniffed that Mr. Binney “has a higher profile in Europe than in the United States,” implying that Mr. Binney was too esoteric for his countrymen.

But Mr. Binney’s hardheadedness has paid off. After his Rubin Museum date, Mr. Binney is headed off with his quartet for another tour of the United States and Canada. Apparently, Americans like his music after all.

We hope Mr. Binney will arrive at the Rubin with a horn section. If not, he can carry the show. He is an ecstatic alto saxophonist whose solos often end in euphoric upper-register cries. He can also whisper the gauziest ballad like Paul Desmond and Johnny Hodges, two of his biggest influences as a player.

“The more I listen to them, the more I realize how heavy they are,” he said.

But Mr. Binney is too much of an auteur to be just another gun-slinging reed player. He doesn’t write tunes that are easily forgotten once the solos begin. He crafts musical narratives in which the soloists are characters in a tightly written plot who must each advance the action.

This is where his talents as a bandleader are evident. Mr. Binney casts some of the finest musicians on the scene to be his stars. They also fill their iPods with the same music.

Mr. Binney says Mr. Taborn, an unsung hero, can literally turn anything into a hook.

“He understands that even if the music is free, grabbing something and repeating it over and over works,” the composer said. “There are a lot of jazz musicians who don’t get that. I remember this one gig we did in Madrid. A waiter dropped knives or something. Craig started doing this delicate thing where he imitated the sounds.”

Mr. Opsvik has a jazz group, Overseas, and an ambient indie rock group, Opsvik & Jennings. Mr. Blade has played with both Wayne Shorter and Joni Mitchell. He recently recorded a surprisingly effective record as a singer-songwriter for Verve.

Mr. Binney says his next record might as well be a classical one.

“There is no improvisation,” he says. “It’s just a string orchestra and sax. There’s a conductor and the whole bit. But there will be a lot of melodies.”

No doubt. In July, Mr. Binney posted a random iPod shuffle list on his Web site that includes music composed by Ned Rorem and Benjamin Britten. He’s also been listening to Death Cab for Cutie.

editorial@observer.com

The Strickland brothers, identical jazz-playing siblings, don’t make it easy for a visitor to tell them apart. There was a time when Marcus, a prodigious tenor and soprano saxophonist, wore his hair longer than E. J., an extraordinarily talented drummer. That helped a lot. Now Marcus and E. J. both keep it close-cropped. Worse, they have matching goatees.

When the twins play jazz together, it often seems as if they are speaking in the same voice. They fielded The Observer’s queries in a similar fashion. Marcus, the most articulate and gregarious of the two, did most of the talking. E. J., shy and soft-spoken, was happy to let his brother to be the frontman, laughing and nodding his head vigorously when Marcus explained how the 30-year-old duo might look like mirror images, but have their own artistic personalities.

“I think we have as many differences as people who aren’t flesh and blood,” Marcus said. “We have very different musical tastes. We are into different things at different times. We came from the same family and the same origins. We learned music in the same house. But we have played with so many different groups as sidemen, we’ve developed very different approaches to jazz.”

This will be evident on Aug. 21 when Marcus and E. J. unveil music from their new CDs on Aug. 21 at Joe’s Pub. Marcus, who recently left legendary bebop drummer Roy Haynes’ band after five years, doesn’t just want to play for “saxophone geeks.” He wants hip-hop, electronic and rock listeners, too.

He reaches out to them on Idiosyncrasies, his sixth record as a leader, covering songs by Björk, Stevie Wonder, Swedish indie folk singer Jose Gonzales and Andre 3000 of OutKast. Marcus doesn’t play these pieces with a look-what-I’m doing-with-this-second-rate-material smirk that you sometimes get from jazz artists when they perform recognizable tunes like these. He reconfigures “She’s Alive,” Andre 3000’s ode to single mothers from A Love Below/Speakerboxxx with the rigor that John Coltrane applied to Broadway favorite “My Favorite Things.”

“We slow it down and make it into a jazz ballad,” Marcus said. “It’s a very beautiful song. It shows you that rappers are musicians, too. It also shows you that not all jazz musicians are living in a vacuum. There are some of us who accept what is going on and actually embrace it.”

E. J., on the other hand, is fascinated by ancient ethnic grooves with which most OutKast fans may be only hazily familiar. He describes his album, In This Day, as “kind of a jazz group meets a percussion section from Cuba or Ghana.” But the beats aren’t the revelation on this record. Like his brother, E. J. has had his share of high-profile gigs. He is currently a member of Ravi Coltrane’s splendid quartet. (Mr. Coltrane also produced In This Day.) It would be astonishing if you didn’t want to get up and shake something while listening to this record.

No, E. J.’s tunes are the surprise. He has obviously absorbed a lot of post-Coltrane jazz from the mid-’70s, which was heavy on pentatonic scales, Third World rhythms and afrocentricity. But E. J. writes gorgeous counter lines for his horn players, and he keeps his soloists on their toes and rewards his listeners by constantly reshuffling the underlying grooves.

And this is E. J.’s first record. What took the quiet Strickland so long?

“My main priority when I hit the scene wasn’t really to be a bandleader right off of the jump,” E. J. explained vaguely. “I didn’t really have everything mapped out in terms of what I wanted my group to sound like or what kind of things I wanted to do. I just realized I wasn’t there yet. My brother was there already. He had a clear idea of what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go.”

E. J.’s personal struggles surely had something to do with this, too. In a recent interview on WBGO, he revealed he and his brothers share a hereditary disease that afflicts their immune system. The drummer said he sometimes feel great pain in his legs, arms and back when he performs.

“For some reason, it’s coming after me more than him,” E. J. lamented to radio listeners. “It might be because I play the drums and use my limbs more than him.”

(He wouldn’t talk about the condition with The Observer.)

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that In This Day has songs with titles like “Find Myself,” “Wrong Turn” and “Abandoned Discovery.” No matter. E. J. has found himself now.

Whatever they may say, E. J. and Marcus aren’t that far apart musically. Who did Marcus call upon to play those Philly Joe Jones–meets–?uestlove beats on Idiosyncrasies? His brother. And who plays E. J.’s longing melodies on In This Day? Marcus, of course. (Well, for the most part. The gifted alto saxophonist Jaleel Shaw is also featured on In This Day.)

But the duo is nevertheless a complementary one: Something happens when the Stricklands play together that is greater than the sum of the parts. Jazz, at its best, is a fascinating conversation between musicians who know each other well enough to finish each other’s thoughts. Think of John Coltrane’s “classic” quartet with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, or Miles Davis’ 1960s quintet with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams.

It takes years for the even the best jazz musicians to develop such rapport. The Stricklands, who grew up in Florida, have it in abundance. But when the brothers improvise, their playing is telepathic. Why wouldn’t it be? They have been playing together constantly since they were in junior high school; they have been listening to music together longer. Marcus said their father, a drummer–turned–criminal defense attorney, played his music for his sons before they were born: “When we were both in the womb, he would put my mom’s tummy right up to the speakers and play all kinds of music—not just jazz but the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Earth Wind & Fire, the Isley Brothers. He was just pumping it into the womb,” Marcus said.

To hear Marcus and E. J. talk about their early years is almost like listening to their musical interaction. They took up instruments when they were 12 and immediately began playing jazz together.

“It was sonic pollution,” Marcus laughed. “We would play for a long time—the same song. Poor Mr. and Mrs. Strickland.

“Our dad would come in the room and go …” The saxophonist waved his finger at his throat and laughed some more. E. J. joined him.

“Yeah, it was sad at first,” E. J. agreed. “But as time went on, we got better and better and better. When most people practice, they are practicing in isolation. But when you practice with someone else, you learn music in a different way. …”

“A more interactive way,” Marcus said.

“You naturally learn to respond to another musician,” E. J. continued.

The Stricklands came to New York to attend the New School. They went out to jam sessions every night ,where they played with stars like Wynton Marsalis. Soon they went off on the road separately with some of their idols, like the younger Mr. Coltrane and Mr. Haynes. When E. J. and Marcus reunited, they had new ingredients for their musical dialogue.

Marcus latched on to what he describes as the “scientific” rhythms his brother gleaned from Ravi Coltrane.

“You will hear the solar system in that music,” he said. “You will hear mathematic equations. At the same time, you will hear R&B influences. I’m glad I got a peep into that music through my brother.”

E. J. couldn’t quite verbalize what happened when Marcus got back from playing with Mr. Haynes, one of the last surviving Jazz greats to have the disticntion of having recorded with both Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. He fumbled a bit and then gave up. “He just got better,” E. J. said.

So when will he and his brother stop emphasizing their relatively minor artistic differences and form a Strickland brothers band? They already play in each other’s separate bands. It seems a little odd to go on like this. “I think it would also stunt our growth,” Marcus said.

“First and foremost, Marcus and I want to find our own identities,” E. J. said. “That’s really important.”

You can’t fault the twins for trying to keep a little distance between each other. What does it matter as long as they keep playing together? That sounds like their plan. “My brother and I have developed a very good relationship, a very healthy relationship,” E. J. said. “I think part of that comes from being identical twins. I’m dating someone who has a fraternal twin. They hate each other!”

editorial@observer.com