Jazz albums round up

Herbie Hancock, Michael Brecker and Roy Hargrove; Yaya3; Bill Wells Trio

In the USA, there's a deadly thing called repertory jazz, which entails musicians paying tribute to their forebears by playing their music again and again and again, until any flicker of the original spirit has been extinguished.

Aside from a few fascinating departures from the norm, such as Don Byron's Jungle Music project, which re-investigates an overlooked period in the career of Duke Ellington, or Dave Douglas's curatorial dedications to Booker Little, Wayne Shorter and Mary Lou Williams, repertory music is in many ways the antithesis of jazz, replacing carefree spontaneity with dull respect. It also mucks about with sequential notions of history, so that it's now possible to hear reconstructed versions of King Oliver, Benny Goodman, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman on the same festival bill, while contemporary experiments remain consigned to the "experimental" fringe. Repertory jazz is also attractive to record companies, which get to pair up dream teams of musicians alive and dead; new signings doing tributes to Miles, Monk or Coltrane is one of the oldest tricks in the major-label book.

That said, Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall (Verve) by the superstar band of Herbie Hancock, Michael Brecker and Roy Hargrove, with John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drums, is actually pretty damn good. Recorded live at Toronto's famous Massey Hall (site of a legendary Charlie Parker gig) at the end of a tour to celebrate what would have been the 75th birthdays of both Miles Davis and John Coltrane, it features the band – which was formed especially for the occasion – on a set of tunes either written by the two dedicatees or associated with them, plus three band originals.

Happily, there's no sense of dull obeisance at all, and the group fairly steams along, in a series of straight-ahead grooves characterised by a superbly swinging bass and drums sound and suitably bravura solos from the principals. Michael Brecker, who has often sounded like a saxophonist capable of everything except an original, passionate, voice, plays particularly well, although his version of the Coltrane favourite "Naima" failed to live up to the illustrious original. You can hear the band live when they come to the Barbican in London for a concert on 9 July.

The repertory jazz effect is also at work on the self-titled debut album from a new trio, Yaya3, for whom Warner Brothers has reactivated its old R&B label, Loma. Basically, it's a vehicle for the star saxophonist Joshua Redman, who is joined by the organist Sam Yahel, with Brian Blade once again on drums to form a retro-ish Hammond organ trio of the type so popular in the Fifties and Sixties. It's there that most of the retro connections stop, however; all the compositions are by band members, and the overall feel is one of muted contemporary bebop rather than a homage to the sax'n'organ monsters of the past. This is a shame, because the album is nice but too polite-sounding for its own good. You can remind yourself of how exciting the originals sounded on two new Blue Note re-releases, Comin' On Home, by Richard "Groove" Holmes, and The Worm, by Jimmy McGriff.

A perfect antidote to repertory jazz can be found on the album Also in White, by the Bill Wells Trio (Geographic, distributed by Vital). Over the primitive drum-machine grooves that kick off the opening track, subtly intricate piano chords intertwine eventually added to by punchy trumpet stabs. Then, after a few minutes, there's an absolutely stunning brass harmony break whose sheer beauty puts you in mind of Gil Evans. Forget the repertoire; alt.jazz might well start here.