Mario Pavone

Photograph: Steven Sussman

Cornelia Street Café; Fri 2
Iridium; Wed 7

Undaunted by recent health issues and leading a brilliant new ensemble, Mario Pavone continues to blaze the path he embarked upon in the late ’60s. The veteran bassist can look back on work with pioneers Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith and Bill Dixon, not to mention 18 years in the late Thomas Chapin’s superb trio. But Pavone isn’t resting on his laurels: His recent output for Playscape, a label he runs with guitarist and frequent collaborator Michael Musillami, has all the marks of an insatiable creative temperament.

In 2008 Pavone released not one but two CDs. The first, Trio Arc, rekindled his relationship with piano legend Paul Bley. On the second, Ancestors, he debuted his Double Tenor Quintet, featuring Jimmy Greene and Tony Malaby—two young saxophonists from different ends of the jazz spectrum, united in a common cause. That’s Pavone’s music in a nutshell: a bridge between the dissonant, structurally open world of the avant-garde and the pulsing, swinging accessibility of jazz tradition. Greene and Malaby dig in and respond to the calibrated fury of it all.

Pavone lives in Connecticut and doesn’t appear in Manhattan all that often. Yet his Double Tenor Quintet gig at Iridium is his second in town in less than a week; his Deez to Blues Sextet plays Cornelia Street Café on Friday 2. Both bands feature Pavone’s secret weapon, the underrated pianist Peter Madsen, whose advanced harmonic approach beautifully suits the leader’s wry, twisted compositions.