Paul Motian Trio Plays WNYC in 1994

Drummer Paul Motian, who died on Tuesday at age 80, was for way too many years the last surviving member of the famed Bill Evans Trio.  (Evans died in 1980 at the age of 51; bassist Scott LaFaro died in 1961, aged 25.)  As jazz writer Larry Blumenfeld noted on Soundcheck, this trio broke the usual piano-with-accompanying-rhythm-section mold and became a single unit of three equal parts.  Maybe that's where Motian got his sense of space and silence, because throughout his career, his drumming was marked by an unparalleled restraint, and a sense of line as opposed to keeping time.  Motian was patient, both in the way his pieces would unfold and in how his career developed.  He was in his mid-40s when he began leading his own groups, and some of his best work came with the trio he formed with the emerging sax player Joe Lovano and the nearly-unknown guitarist Bill Frisell in the early 1980s.  

In June 1994, that trio played in our WNYC studio on my old show, "Around New York."  Listen to this performance, "Yahllah," and you'll hear three musicians sharing an almost telepathic musical connection.