K. Leander Williams/tru2blupix​

Better than: Whatever "the same ol', same ol'" means to you.

I wish some neuroscientist (perhaps edgy violinist-turned-Columbia University neurobiologist Dave Soldier?) would conduct a study on the musical transformation of pianist Fred Hersch. It's easy to use words like "miraculous" to describe Hersch's return to the jazz scene after several months in an AIDS-related coma in 2008; the term came up again just yesterday in Hersch's radio interview with WNYC's Leonard Lopate. As Hersch piloted his working trio at the Village Vanguard last night, however, what crystallized for me is that his revitalization is actually two-tiered. His full recovery is indeed remarkable (Hersch had to re-learn basic skills like walking and talking before he even touched a piano), but what's equally fascinating is how his playing has changed—in some cases, for the better.

K. Leander Williams/tru2blupix​

Better than: Having to send a search party for the silver lining.

"You've really done a lot with the place," joked guitarist-songwriter Bob Mould to the crowd as he took a well-deserved breather in Williamsburg Park on Friday. He'd commandeered his newest power trio through half of a 90-minute concert before addressing the audience, and since the band had just put blisters on Copper Blue—the 1992 debut/breakthrough/career milestone from Mould's second great band, Sugar—it seemed like a good time to remind folks that he'd been a neighborhood resident during that record's formative stages. "Most of those songs were actually written right over there on Richardson," he said, pointing inland from the makeshift outdoor space on the waterfront.

K. Leander Williams/tru2blupix​

Jenny Scheinman at the Village Vanguard on September 2, 2012.

Better than: Music that keeps you at a distance.

During her early set at the Village Vanguard on Friday, violinist Jenny Scheinman pulled out just one cover, Duke Ellington's "Awful Sad." It's not hard to see why she's fond of that particular piece; like Scheinman's music in general, "Sad" mixes melancholy with hope and playfulness, never painting things as bleak but hardly taking the position that life is one big ray of sunshine. And so it was this middle ground between dark and light that served as Scheinman's home base for the set. It was a truthful place to be.

To be fair, though, Scheinman is likely enamored with "Sad" for another reason, too: it has a memorable, straightforward melody. Unlike many on the jazz landscape today, Scheinman keeps it simple, writing earthy, folky lines that beckon and envelop. Even at its most technical, her music is never a spectacle to be witnessed; it's something to be shared, and passed around.

K. Leander Williams/tru2blupix​

Better than: Thinking about the GOP convention.

"Simon says, get the fuck up! Y'all heard me, get the FUCK up!!" Street versifier Pharoahe Monch has yelled those words countless times since "Simon Says" broke him big back at the turn of the millennium, but the most ironic thing about hearing them last night at the Blue Note wasn't so much the context (hip-hopper at jazz club) as the constraints built into the endeavor. The seated crowd—signaling its adulation with arm waving as soon as Monch's cameo with the Revive Big Band had begun three tunes earlier—would no doubt have been on their feet if the Blue Note's floor plan allowed it. Instead, shouts from throughout the club subbed for freedom of movement.

K. Leander Williams/tru2blupix​

Better than: The terrible twos.

The word's out in jazz about the cache of collectives with band names as opposed to ensembles named for or operated by a catalyst instrumentalist or leader. Last night, after following veteran altoist Lee Konitz onstage, the other members of the quartet Enfants Terribles tried valiantly to dispel the idea that the saxist—at 84, the eldest of the group's elder statesmen—was running the show. The altoist himself started the gig at center stage, but seemed to think better of it after opening with a typically discursive run through "Solar", the Chuck Wayne melody that Miles Davis' estate holds the copyright on. Konitz then slid to the left of seated bassist (and next elder) Gary Peacock and stayed there, placing the band in a straight line that left viewers with no fixed focal point save for where each sound in the sax/guitar/bass/drum unit came from. Surveying that barren space at center stage reminded me of the stories I'd read about how the postpunk band Joy Division tried to carry on after frontman Ian Curtis's death; none of the surviving members dared stand in the space he usually inhabited.

K. Leander Williams/tru2blupix​

Better than: Being an extra in a spy thriller.

Clearly, I'm a bit more of a diva than Sierra Leonean singer-songwriter Ahmed Janka Nabay. The setting for his record release party last night could barely have been more swank, but for all the comforts offered by the downstairs room in Harlem hot boîte Red Rooster, live music presentation is obviously not a priority. That the scene felt like the set of a '60s spy thriller only enhanced the sense at first that Nabay and his band Bubu Gang were somewhat incidental; the real action might have been the exchange of a flash drive with serious global implications going down in the crowd, with the Gang's driving dance rhythms serving as its cover. But last night, instead of whining (like me) about the dreadful sound, or lamenting (me again) the fact that Ginny's has almost no decent sightlines to the stage unless you score the table where David Byrne (Nabay's Luaka Bop executive producer) was sitting much of the time, the singer and his party band went to work winning folks over.

Better than: An evening lazin' in the park.

As a longtime resident of Fort Greene, I've gotten used to changes. (Insert standard gentrification gripe here.) They don't tend to come without warning, though, so when I stepped away from the hanging-in-the-grass vibe in Fort Greene Park yesterday between sets by THEESatisfaction and Shabazz Palaces, I probably shouldn't have been surprised to come back in the middle of an everybody-on-your-feet throwdown. Wish I could tell y'all how it went from one to the other. The only certainty is that In the ten-minute space I used to pedal (furiously, I might add) home to my own bathroom, Shabazz Palaces managed to get all these folks who seemed to be chillin' on blankets at girl duo THEESatisfaction's stoned soul picnic not only standing, but pushed right up against the stage.

They stayed that way, for obvious reasons. I think somewhere in there a metaphor exists for how Ishmael Butler, the MC-lyricist half of Shabazz Palaces, transformed himself from the groove-juice sipping Butterfly of Digable Planets to his current electro-charged alter-ego Palaceer Lazaro. Having vacated an apartment right near Fort Greene Park around the time Digable called it quits back in 1996, Butler has been putting things together from Seattle—where he was a basketball star in high school—ever since. Folks like to point out that his parents were boho/Marxist/whatever when that actually meant something, and though his music reflects that as much now as it did in the '90s, it'd probably be a mistake to look at Lazaro as anything more than a persona Butler is damn good at fleshing out.

K. Leander Williams/tru2blupix​

Better than: Air conditioning in a heat wave.

There's a shopping list of fine pop bands from throughout the African continent listed on one page of drumming major John Miller Chernoff's esteemed 1979 ethnographic study African Rhythm and African Sensibility. He names several acts that have now been recognized in the West for quite some time, but somehow Benin's Orchestre Poly-Rythmo—whose full name at that time translated as the "Poly-Rhythmic Orchestra of Cotonou," after its home city in the small West African nation—is the sole group described with an adjective: "marvelous." The mention didn't do them much good at the time (Poly-Rythmo would disband within a decade, reeling from personnel losses as well as the independent nation's '80s lurch toward dictatorship), but as advance notice of the band that hit Central Park SummerStage yesterday, it might be seen as a message of assurance reaching across generations.

Trio 3.

Better than: Bidness as usual.

In theory, last night's gig by a piano-augmented version of Trio 3 had its share of conventions. For starters, Oliver Lake stood out front on the bandstand at Birdland with an alto saxophone, the presumptive lead voice in a quartet, a hornplayer pushed by a rhythm section. The immaculate cut of his suit (convention number two) focused the audience's attention as surely as the mic tricks he employed at climactic intervals to alter his tone's dynamics. (Incidentally, he was the only musician onstage who chose business attire.) As Lake slowly waved the alto from the left to right across the mic, approximating the sound of that car you've spied in the rearview that passes you and then disappears in the distance, it hit home that the St. Louis-bred veteran, 69, is of that generation that turned the solo saxophone recital into an art. He also cofounded the famously rhythm-sectionless World Saxophone Quartet, an ensemble of reedists quite comfortable keeping its own time.

K. Leander Williams/tru2blupix​

Better than: Imagining the funk of 40,000 years...

Last year The Guardian put together a list of 50 key events in the history of jazz music, and Cassandra Wilson managed to nab slot No. 46 for "rediscovering the blues" on her Blue Note debut Blue Light 'Til Dawn. That was just shy of 20 years ago, and even though I'm not sure that event would have made my top 50, hearing Wilson's band last night offered persuasive evidence that the record was still the defining milestone in her career.

For starters, guitarist Brandon Ross, one of the shepherds of Wilson's conversion from what one might call M-Base jazz-funk neophyte to Delta-bred Earth Mother, was onstage with her again, serving as one half of the twin-guitar rusticity that has pretty much defined her touring bands since that album's release. Ross is the kind of improviser who can rock hard while avoiding the heroic inflections that have come to define rock. He was matched by Wilson's frequent music director Marvin Sewell, whose mix of slides and spacey bent notes has the blues side covered and then some.