The tenor saxophonist Chris Potter and the pianist Jason Moran, who round out a group he calls 3 in 1, breezed through the syncopated melody together. Then came an illuminating contrast, as each of Mr. Motian’s attentive partners took a turn pairing off with him.
Their approaches weren’t divergent so much as conceptually distinct. Mr. Potter, pushing out his sound in gusts, held fast to a linear momentum, with each of his ideas falling into oblique alignment with the one that came before. Mr. Moran advanced a rumbling wit, using both hands to flesh out his variations on the theme. Absorbing the two solos, with their separate rigors, felt a bit like viewing adjacent paintings by Mondrian and Mir.
Mr. Motian has never had a problem reconciling multiple strains of modernism. Throughout “23rd Street Theme” and another lively original, “Onetwo,” he kept flowing time on a ride cymbal, adding annotative thumps with his bass drum. During the greater part of the set he stirred the air with brushes, maintaining a ballad pulse. The feeling was loose but hardly ever vague because of the counterweight of his band mates.
The playing of Mr. Moran in particular had a strong pull in the music, attesting to some deep compatibility with Mr. Motian. An original called “Casino” began with a solemn preamble on piano, and Mr. Moran summoned similar forces of concentration in his solo, making almost every note feel carefully determined. On the Billie Holiday-Arthur Herzog Jr. ballad “Don’t Explain,” his gently tolling chords created an air of fragile contemplation, which he disrupted just once, with a percussive and dissonant stab.
