Play ball!

Whenever I hear someone shout that phrase, as when baseball season opened last week, I can’t help but think they’re exclaiming an anagram for the outstanding Canadian pianist Paul Bley (aka “Bley, Paul”). That, in turn, puts me in mind of Mr. Bley’s famous ex-wife, the marvelous composer, bandleader, and pianist Carla Bley, who is appearing this week at Birdland with her trio, the Lost Chords.

The idea of anagrams — taking the components of something and reworking them into something else — is at the heart of Ms. Bley’s music, and so, too, surprisingly, is baseball. She began on Wednesday with an extended work titled “National Anthem,” which just as easily could have been named “National Pastime.” Ms Bley’s longtime collaborator, the bassist Steve Swallow, introduced the work by warning us to be prepared for a long uninterrupted piece, but it was laid out in five shorter chunks and was easy to digest.

It immediately became clear that “National Anthem” is a musical anagram of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” At one point, it was a bebop-style harmonic variation, with tenor saxophonist Andy Sheppard laying down fast flurries of notes over the cycle of chords, while Francis Scott Key’s melody was shunted to the sidelines; at another, it was a soulful, R&B-style rendition, as if “The Star-Spangled Banner” had been written by Curtis Mayfield. At other times, it became a funk number with a heavy backbeat, a funeral dirge, and even a 12-bar blues.

At various periods in Ms. Bley’s career — as with her big band, and even more so on her highly acclaimed and ambitious “Escalator Over the Hill” (1971) — her work has been musically complex, and additionally saddled with theoretical and political baggage. The music of the Lost Chords trio, however, is admirably simple and direct: Everything is exactly what it seems to be, and yet the three group members create all the musical elements — harmony, melody, and rhythm — at once. Even though any one of them may come forward at any time, you never feel as though you’re listening to a bunch of musicians merely taking turns.

That was one factor that reminded me of Ornette Coleman; another was that Mr. Swallow played a five-string electric bass that, like Al MacDowell’s in Mr. Coleman’s group, became a guitar when he played with Mr. Sheppard’s tenor saxophone and remained a bass when he played with Ms. Bley’s piano.

Ms. Bley showed more of her talent for musical anagrams with “Awful Coffee,” which, if my decoding skills are working properly, was a variant on “Tea for Two,” in which the “T” could have stood for “Thelonious.” Monk was further referenced in “Mister Misterioso,” which uses the legendary pianist-composer’s classic as a jumping-off point. When jazz composers use an existing tune as a basis for a composition, it’s often said that they “elaborate” on the original, yet Ms. Bley seemed to be doing just the opposite: Her take on “Misterioso” was as much a simplification as an elaboration, reducing the song to its most fundamental elements (the basic blues) while adding to it at the same time.

Two ballads, “Permanent Wave” and “Valse Sinestro,” featured a bittersweet, Fellini-like quality, especially the latter, which was played in 3/4 time and in minor keys, with Mr. Sheppard switching to soprano saxophone. But the most striking amalgam was “Sidewinders in Paradise,” a mix of the most famous melodies of the late trumpeter Lee Morgan and the even later Russian composer Alexander Borodin, on top of a Pan-American beat: a hard bop-opera amalgam played on coconut shells. Ms. Bley uses a similarly Morganesque beat on “Hip Hop,” on her group’s marvelous debut album, “The Lost Chords,” from 2004.

This combination of piano, sax, and whatever it is Mr. Swallow is playing doesn’t sound like any other trio. Likewise, the five-piece edition, heard on the group’s new album, “The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu,” doesn’t sound like any other quintet, even though it features the standard rhythm-section instrumentation, namely tenor and trumpet (in the form of the titular Sardinian brass man Paolo Fresu, whom they recorded with in Rome last spring). Ms. Bley’s compositions are as whimsical as ever, as indicated by such titles as “Liver of Life” and the comic strip-like packaging of the new album. Even her Web site (carlabley.com) is laid out in the form of a map of a penitentiary.

I’m not sure what’s supposed to be funny about prison, but it’s altogether likely that Ms. Bley (who, at 72, still has the distinctive blond bangs that make her look like Cameron Diaz’s mother) is making a further statement about the nature of freedom. This brings us back to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and in turn to the famous line about its composer in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America”: “He set the word ‘free’ on a note so high no one could reach it.” Ms. Bley makes both the note and the concept of freedom itself imminently accessible.

wfriedwald@nysun.com