Two pianists who pushed the envelope

Dave Brubeck blazed a musical trail, but he waxes nostalgic in a new package. And Cecil Taylor hews to his unfettered ways in complicity with the Italian Instabile Orchestra.

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Dave Brubeck

“Private Brubeck Remembers” (Telarc)

Brubeck has always been a unique jazz artist. His playing straddles the music of the pre-World War II era and the new approaches to harmony and rhythm that arrived with the postwar bebop generation. Classically trained, creatively adventurous, he was, in his early years, a musical revolutionary who insisted upon following his own musical path rather than run with the bebop pack.

(He once told me of his first meeting with Paul Desmond at a jam session. When the decision was made to play the blues in B flat, Brubeck started the first chorus with a resounding G major chord -- far distant from, but eventually working its way back to B flat. Desmond, he recalled, simply rolled his eyes.)

In this fascinating release due May 25, timed close to the 60th anniversary of D-Day, he plays a program of solo piano pieces from the war years in autumnal renderings that are among the finest performances he has ever recorded. Beyond the atmospheric memories associated with songs such as “Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me,” “For All We Know,” “Lili Marlene” and “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” there are the special Brubeck touches -- the piquant, unexpected harmonic alterations, the bright, jaunty swing (on tunes such as “For You” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”) and his arching melody lines.

The two-CD package includes a disc chronicling an hourlong conversation between Brubeck and Walter Cronkite surveying the experiences of Brubeck’s wartime years. And as a bonus, there is a detailed booklet with a lengthy essay by Brubeck recalling his experiences, illustrated with black and white photographs of Brubeck and his wartime band.

His descriptions of the songs and their significance to the servicemen of the period, add even more poignancy to the music.

“‘When I Grow Too Old to Dream,’ ” he writes, “reminds me of those tense days of waiting when we were faced with the knowledge that our lives were in the balance.”

A few of those tense days took place during the Battle of the Bulge, when Brubeck’s Wolf Pack Band was at one point practically surrounded by the enemy and listening to the German disc jockey Axis Sally “telling us to come out with our hands up.”

Two original Brubeck songs, “We Crossed the Rhine” and “Weep No More,” also highlight this must-have collection. The former was written after his unit made the dangerous Rhine crossing on a pontoon bridge, the latter was composed for his wife, Iola, after the end of the war in Germany. “It was,” Brubeck writes, “The first ballad I ever wrote.”

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Cecil Taylor

“The Owner of the River Bank” (Enja/Justin Time)

Like Brubeck -- in an entirely different mode and manner -- Taylor has refused to be defined by genre or era. He has, since the ‘50s, been an utterly singular pianist-composer. His definitive work on recordings mostly traces to live performances in which his transformation of the piano into a virtual percussive instrument has the fullest opportunity to rove through peaks and valleys of intensity.

On “The Owner,” he performs in concert with the Italian Instabile Orchestra. The partnership seems to be an appropriate one, since the Instabile Orchestra has long been one of Europe’s most pioneering large free jazz ensembles. And the music, which consists of the seven otherwise untitled movements of Taylor’s “The Owner of the River Bank,” is clearly wide-open enough to allow all participants plenty of musical range on which to roam.

In fact, the music has been produced by methods common to contemporary classical music and a great deal of avant-garde jazz since the mid-’60s. Taylor and the Instabile players rehearsed intensively before the performances, working with fragments of melody, themes, ideas and general directions, using them to assemble spontaneous ensemble passages at Taylor’s direction. Coursing through and around the ensemble segments, individual soloists dart across the spectrum, with Taylor’s piano melding everything.

This is undeniably difficult music to hear, and its connection to jazz will be elusive for many listeners. But it is, nonetheless, a representative work from musicians probing the outer limits of what does and doesn’t work as music, exploring the force and power of sounds beyond the envelope of traditional harmony, melody and rhythm.