Big Bang’s Echoes, 50 Years Later

The legacy of Impulse Records has hardly lacked for commemoration. The label keeps repackaging albums, even as its parent company, the Verve Music Group, slouches away from instrumental jazz. Five years ago Ashley Kahn published “The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records” (W. W. Norton), an aficionado’s history and, in essence, a corporate biography. This week brought the release of a CD boxed set, “First Impulse: The Creed Taylor Collection” (Hip-O Select/Verve), that gathers the six albums produced for the label by its founder.

In a welcome bit of programming, each of those albums — notable titles by Ray Charles, the composer-arranger Gil Evans, the trombonist Kai Winding and the saxophonists John Coltrane and Oliver Nelson — is being celebrated at the Jazz Standard by present-day artists in a series called Impulse! Nights. The kickoff, on Wednesday, involved Coltrane’s “Africa/Brass” as interpreted by Saxophone Summit, featuring David Liebman and Ravi Coltrane, with Phil Markowitz on piano, Cecil McBee on bass and Billy Hart on drums.

The late set, which began like a thunderclap and ended as an oceanic swell, was most intriguing for the contrast between its two frontmen, each a different kind of heir to the Coltrane sound. Ravi Coltrane, the son of John and Alice Coltrane, was 2 when his father died in 1967; since coming into his own as a saxophonist, he has carefully weighed his stylistic inheritance against his own artistic identity, which skews cooler in temperament. Here he seemed unusually intent on strident epiphany: his solo on “Blues Minor,” the opener, was full of overblown notes and impassioned digressions, hard swerves out of the given key.

Mr. Liebman, who will turn 65 this fall, came of age in John Coltrane’s immediate wake. His own style, can be understood as a specific dialect of the Coltrane language. And on almost every solo he dug impressively deep. Playing tenor on “Blues Minor,” he worked a cantorial cry; his soprano turn on “Song of the Underground Railroad,” a reworked spiritual not included on the original LP, had him evoking the fever pitch of the post-Coltrane avant-garde.

For all the focus on saxophones, a Coltrane tribute lives or dies by its rhythm section, and this one labored admirably. Mr. Markowitz, in his tolling accompaniment as well as in his methodical solos, suggested a contemporary gloss on the McCoy Tyner school, filtered through the likes of Chick Corea. And Mr. Hart was the heavy lifter, managing an inexhaustible and, just as crucially, personal take on Elvin Jones’s polyrhythmic fire.

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