Lincoln Avenue Blues

Thompson has become unmatched among living traditional-jazz pianists by vitalizing tunes rather than white-gloving them in a musty corner of the jazz museum. Here, solo, he interprets afresh--though with no sense of modernization or presumption--12 classic jazz-blues tunes by greats from the dawn of the jazz tradition, including Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Clarence Williams, and Bessie Smith. Particularly fetching are Pine Top Smith's "Boogie Woogie" and the seminal "St. James Infirmary." Mindful of the the tunes' context in the emerging, hybrid jazz form, Thompson invokes in these performances the echoes and peels of the parades, the brothels, and the gambling dens. Thompson, an early-jazz authority, appeared for 12 years on A Prairie Home Companion and starred in the off-Broadway Jelly Roll. --Peter Monaghan