In a special, one hour noon-time concert at the Lyceum Theater, pianist Joshua White and bassist Mark Dresser welcomed tenor saxophonist Ben Schachter to San Diego for a trio performance that celebrated and extended the jazz tradition before a substantial audience.

White and Schachter began as a duo on the Monk composition, "Lets Call This," with the saxophonist's airy and slightly acidic tenor winding pathways around the increasingly propulsive chording of White until they both lit on a trilled arpeggio. The pianist displayed a muscular swing that rippled motion in all directions.

Dresser joined the trio for an empathic reading of his original, "For Bradford," a dark, elliptical theme that featured resonant bowing yielding to grainy pizzicato and thunderous thwacks. The bluesy melody wrapped around each musician like a python, and Dresser's time broke into multiple, shifting tempi.

Another Dresser original, "Ekoneni," found piano and bass trading ecstatic phrases and evoking the spirit of the Zimbabwean marketplace. White surged forward on a lyric journey that made me think of Keith Jarrett and Jaki Byard while the bassist kept the flow going with foot-stomps, strummed-double-stops and startling harmonics.

Schachter explored another Monk piece, "Pannonica," a cappella, beginning with strings of percussive pad-popping--then via the layering of phrases of differing lengths, breaking the form into shifting vignettes and weaving together repetitions, appoggiatura and brief forays into multiphonics.

All three musicians tore into Charlie Parker's "Perhaps," with an abstract delight--Dresser playing snatches of the melody and inventive counterpoint before dropping into a joyous "four". Schachter set orbits of freebop blues invention into motion, and White crafted racing lines of chord-tones with dissonant clusters as if Bud Powell and Don Pullen were fighting for cogitative control.

Finally, White pulled one of his most arresting originals, "The Lower Case," up for discussion. It was amazing to watch all three listen and respond to each other as what was on the page became subservient to the inspiration of the moment. Schachter cast squiggly webs of articulations into the air, and White picked up on the tenor's waning notes and recast them into a effervescent blues dissertation. Dresser followed with plucking that choked certain notes and revived others, before striking arco manipulations took over.

Improvisation in its purest form, and proof positive that unfettered creativity can also be highly entertaining.

Photo by Richard White