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Roach’s accomplishments were legion: He played key roles in the development of modern jazz. He went to Haiti in the 1940s to study with the great Afro-Haitian drummer Ti Roro, and taught at the UMass Amherst for a couple of decades, beginning in 1972. He was a civil rights icon, and received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1988.

And he was a gifted composer.

“We wanted to focus on Max’s compositions,” explains Calvaire. “Obviously, we know Max has played on a million records: Clifford Brown, Charlie Parker — the list goes on. But [people] don’t really focus on what he accomplished as a composer.”

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McLaughlin and Hussain were relative pups when they met in New York in 1970, having each moved to the United States the year before. McLaughlin would form his supergroup Mahavishnu Orchestra the next year, having already helped Miles Davis, Tony Williams, and others spearhead the creation of jazz-rock fusion with his electric guitar. Hussain, a prodigy still in his late teens, would soon relocate to California to teach at the Ali Akbar College of Music near San Francisco.

It was at the home of the college’s founder, Ali Akbar Khan, that McLaughlin and Hussain played together for the first time. “In that moment, the two of us just sat down and jammed in front of Ali Akbar Khan,” recounts McLaughlin. “I mean, how pretentious can you get? When you’re young, you don’t care. He had his tabla, I had an acoustic guitar. It was really the pivotal experience behind the formation of Shakti.”

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“You also hear Jason speak about his own music on his own terms. We’ve heard Jason speak about James Reese Europe, on Jason’s terms. We’ve heard Jason talk about Thelonious Monk, on Jason’s own terms. This is Jason, in his own piece, talking about Jason in his own terms — while his wife watches and interrupts.”

“And vice versa,” interjects Jason. “Same for Alcia.”

“And that is ‘Family Ball,’” she declares.

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He studied saxophone and clarinet in high school, and while in junior college hooked up with the nascent AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) and founding members Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and Joseph Jarman. He took up gospel music, switching from tenor to alto saxophone in the process, and toured with charismatic evangelist Horace Sheppard. He survived a perilous tour in Vietnam with the Army, his “blasphemous” arrangement of patriotic music earning him immediate reassignment from musician duty stateside to infantryman in Pleiku during the Tet Offensive.

When he returned to Chicago, Threadgill made a good living playing parades and other music in the city’s various ethnic neighborhoods.

“I was playing in about three, four parades a month, and paying all my bills,” he recalls. “When I came to New York I was highly disappointed. The rent was higher. They were making less money up here than we were making in Chicago on little simple things.”

Threadgill persevered in New York, and in 1988 New York Times critic Peter Watrous described him as “perhaps the most important jazz composer of his generation.”

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Ghost Song is more concise (at 46 minutes) and thematically unified than previous Salvant albums. It is also her first release for Nonesuch Records, after four with Mack Avenue.

“The reason that I moved to Nonesuch was, in part, because Nonesuch is a label that I have a lot of attachment to from a listener’s perspective,” Salvant explains. “A lot of the records that I grew up listening to, my mom’s CD collection, were Nonesuch records, and they were not tied to any particular genre. It’s not necessarily the eclecticism; it was just the deep connection that I had to those albums and to those artists.”

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Bley, 82, and Swallow, 78, were about to launch a rare trio tour with saxophonist Andy Sheppard, to conclude with four sets at the Regattabar this weekend— by which time, notes Swallow, “We should be loaded for bear.” But seated at their kitchen table that morning, the couple proves a pair of witty, down-to-earth raconteurs.

When, for example, the visitor suggests that Sheppard sounded something like Sonny Rollins on the calypso-accented song “Chicken,” from the trio’s 1994 live album Songs With Legs, Bley reveals a surprising fact.

“Did you know that ‘Chicken’ was written by chickens? she asks. “I swear it’s true. There were some chickens that came to the porch in a place we were at — on the island of Tortola, the British Virgin Islands — and every morning the chickens would come and cluck tunes, and to me they were very melodic and interesting. It was done by two chickens actually, so one chicken . . .

“The other one was named John,” Swallow interjects.

“John,” she confirms, “and who else?”

“I forget what the main chicken . . .”says Swallow, fumbling for its name. “That’s terrible to forget the name of the composer.”

“Yeah,” Bley agrees, “we should give credit to that chicken.”

“She shamelessly collects the royalties,” Swallow deadpans, eyeing the visitor.

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Exploring newer, more commercial styles also dovetails with greater exposure, of course, something Glasper wants not only for his own music but for jazz in general. “Yeah, I’m a jazz pianist,” he explains. “But I also like other things, like everyone else. I like chicken and I like beef. It’s not that big of a deal. The point of this record was to bring music to the mainstream people to hear: something they can identify with, and that I identify with. I identify with jazz. I identify with gospel. I identify with soul. I identify with neo-soul. I identify with pop, R&B, rock, pop rock, hard rock — all that. It’s all a part of me. So I don’t want my music to be just a secret for jazz people.”

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Her first album, Embers and Ashes, appeared in 1960, and Miles Davis liked it so much he insisted on having Horn open for him that year at the Village Vanguard. Other albums followed, including collaborations with Quincy Jones, but by this time, Horn had become a mother, which limited her touring.

Horn's career didn't hit full stride again until Verve Records signed her in the late ’80s. Since then, nine consecutive CDs have been nominated for Grammys, with Horn winning best jazz vocal performance in 1998 for I Remember Miles.

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Dr. John says his next album, for which he is now assembling demos from collaborators, will be made up of new songs focused on New Orleans and Katrina. Expect an angry record. Dr. John is furious at the government for what happened to his city.

“I'm tryin' to get something to maybe open it and close it on a not-angry note,” says Dr. John, who uses his real name, Mac Rebennack, in conversation. “But right now, just about everything for me and my co-writers is, I couldn't even call it ‘anger.’ I'd call it “pissed off.’”

Critics have called In Search of Momentum Jamal's best recording in years, and critic Stanley Crouch flat out declares him the greatest living jazz pianist.

“He's the king, as far as I'm concerned,” says Crouch, a newspaper columnist who has taught jazz studies at Columbia and Juilliard and is writing a biography of Charlie Parker. “I don't think anybody plays with greater freedom than he does, and that includes Ornette Coleman.”

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“The first time I heard Dewey Redman play live,” he says, “it was in Boston. I think it was 1972. He was playing with Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian. I was going to Berklee at the time, just out of high school, and man, it was such an incredible quartet — the way they played together, and the communication, and the free-flowing music. They really created music on those dates. Those were the cats I wanted to play with. It gave me a lot of direction in those years, in the '70s, about trying to develop a concept that was free-flowing yet harmonically and rhythmically and melodically based.”

As he works through his meal of mulligatawny and squid curry, Lovano offers postmortems on some of what went on at school that Monday. The weak way the student horn players came in behind Lovano on the bass player's tune in the first ensemble class, for instance.

“I was playing a melody at a certain volume and a certain energy that gave the rhythm section direction,” he recalls, “and when I came to the end of that chorus, they came in like I hadn't played a thing. Very weak in their sound and their rhythm and in their whole attitude about the music they were playing. And that's a big part of playing together: being able to generate and react to each other's energy and volume and sound and dynamics.”

Fifty years ago, such lessons were learned on bandstands. “Back then,” notes Lovano, “my dad's generation, you stood toe to toe with cats. And that's the best way. A lot of the players who came up playing in bands, that was the key factor — playing at the level of the cat sitting next to you.

“That's why I play a lot in my ensemble classes. Not only exploring the tune we're playing, but just the attitude behind your sound and the presence that you can create. You're always trying to hip each other to new ways of playing and to do it without talking too much. Just doing it by example.”

“It must be very difficult for Tony Williams to know what to do next. With Miles Davis at 17, taking the drumming world as well as the musical world by storm at 19 — and there you are, you've got to make your living from that level up. You know what I mean? It's very difficult. His Lifetime band was great. I saw them.”

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