J.D. Allen
‘Americana Vol. 2’ (Savant Records)

“Only from the entirely old can the entirely new be born.” That line was attributed to Bela Bartok, and he should know. 

Bartok’s notion seems entirely relevant to the music of the tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen, who played Dizzy’s for two nights last week with his exceptional trio, co-starring bassist Gregg August and drummer Rudy Royston, along with a special guest collaborator guitarist, Charlie Hunter.  

Mr. Allen’s music is the sort that sets one to constantly musing about the interrelationship of the entirely old and the entirely new.   

Like Christian McBride’s New Jawn quartet, which was at Dizzy’s just earlier, this music is Mr. Allen’s own take on early Ornette Coleman-style free jazz. It’s a highly personal approach to modern jazz that’s primarily based on melodic improvisation, rather than the chordally based variations that we associate with bebop. This is a rather technical explanation for a type of music that doesn’t really sound the least bit technical when you listen to it, especially live in an intimate venue like Dizzy’s. 

In 2016, Mr. Allen had the idea of bringing what might be called his postmodern approach to some of the earliest American roots music that exists, the most basic blues and jazz that’s out there, resulting in the album “Americana (Musings On Jazz And Blues).” Last year, he expanded the canvas — and made a good thing even better — by bringing in Mr. Hunter and forming a quartet on “Americana Vol. 2.” 

On Thursday, Mr. Allen opened with the first tune from that album, “Up South.” It was an intriguing start, in that first Mr. Allen played about two lines of the melody before abandoning the stage for a few minutes and letting the drums and bass set the mood of tune, a slowly rocking vamp that mostly hangs on two distinct notes. At about three minutes in, Mr. Allen joined Messrs. August and Royston in playing the basic vamp as Mr. Hunter soloed.

Mr. Allen followed with “The Werk Song” and then “Tell the Truth Shame the Devil” from “Vol. 1.” The two “Americana” volumes contain a total of 20 tracks, almost all inspired by very early blues and jazz numbers. Unlike much contemporary jazz, the pieces are relatively brief — both on the CDs and in person, they’re rarely more than five minutes each; many could fit on one side of a vintage 78 RPM record.  

Mr. Allen and his collaborators know the value of brevity, and they never stretch out a composition just for its own sake, with a result that they could play 14-15 songs in an 80-minute set.

The pre-written parts of the composition tend to be very brief indeed, just a couple of highly memorable lines that Mr. Allen and company then use as springboards for melodic variations. Because the “tunes” themselves are so short, it’s hard not to think of the improvisations as part of the actual composition. Thus when there’s a drum solo, say, it doesn’t just seem like the drummer’s going off on his own for a star turn, but as if he’s instead playing his specific part of the composition.  

The overall format then becomes something other than melody-and-solos but a continual unbroken, albeit short, work in which all is of a piece, not broken up into solos — even when it is. 

At Dizzy’s, Mr. Hunter played a traditional six-string guitar rather than his signature seven- and eight-string instruments, which are perhaps better described as electric guitar/bass hybrids. As Mr. McBride’s quartet demonstrated last week, it seems more possible to avoid a conventionally chordal approach when there’s not a piano or guitar around, but Mr. Hunter’s boisterous presence definitely spiced things up even further. 

He sat on stage left, facing the trio, and between his bushy black beard, omnipresent tattoos, and an aggressive, confrontational attitude — indicated by a rather ferocious grin — he looked for all the world like Taika Waititi as Blackbeard the Pirate in the HBO Max series “Our Flag Means Death.”

Mr. Allen’s tunes are almost all originals inspired by early roots music.  Many are identifiably the 12-bar blues, and at least one is inspired by gospel music, in particular the traditional “This Train.” Further, some are Latinate-style boogaloo tunes, while another seems to dip into the same melodic well as Eddie Harris’s “Freedom Jazz Dance” and Jimmy Heath’s “Gingerbread Boy.”  

The project thus far also includes two standards. At Dizzy’s, it was Rodgers and Hart’s “You Are Too Beautiful,” which Mr. Allen was likely inspired to play by Sonny Rollins, who in turn had been inspired by Al Jolson.  He phrased it à la Rollins, emphasizing the lowest notes of his horn, in what Lester Young might call “baritone-tenor.” On “Americana Vol. 2” he treats us to “You Don’t Know Me,” a classic country ballad by Eddy Arnold made more universal by Ray Charles and Elvis Presley. On both tunes he stresses the song more or less as written rather than getting into the weeds of harmonic variations. 

Some tunes were fit for the dance hall, others sounded like they came from church, and still others seemed to belong in the boudoir. Placing them on the jazz timeline is more problematic — do they belong with the earliest jazz or the most recent? Mr. Allen, who went through the whole show barely speaking a word and not introducing any tunes, didn’t offer any answers, preferring to let the music speak for itself. Indeed it did.