On August 11th, two days after he turned 77 years old, jazz drummer/legend Jack DeJohnette and his trio gave one of the best musical performances I’ve ever seen at the Shalin Liu Center in Rockport, Mass. His two partners here are saxophonist Ravi Coltrane (son of John) and bassist Matt Garrison, son of Coltrane classic-quartet bassist Jimmy Garrison. This inter-generational/progeny combo has been a side project for about five years now and the anticipation was palatable as the veteran drummer-pianist, whose first solo LP (and his appearance on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew) date back a half-century, ambled onstage followed by Ravi with three saxophones strapped to his neck and Matt clutching his five-string electric bass.

The Shalin Liu Center has become quite the marquee venue since it opened in 2010, just as much for its dramatic location as for its exemplary acoustics. The building is squeezed in between the shops and art galleries of this destination seaport and behind the stage is a two-story window overlooking Rockport’s Back Harbor (the main harbor is on the other side of a little peninsula where sits Motif #1). The atmospherics could not have been any greater as the group settled in under an otherworldly green-gray twilight sky. DeJohnette started an extraordinary half-hour suite of songs by sitting down at the house Steinway, playing a soft melody. He ended it an extended and dramatic flourish on his drum kit to climax the group’s dramatic rendition of John Coltrane’s 1963 civil-rights eulogy “Alabama.”

It was a sublime thirty minutes of sensual, exploratory interplay that was as exultant as it was daring. DeJohnette’s sterling reputation precedes him by five decades of course, and his powerful and unique style has not dimmed with the years: the audience got the full complement of his tom-tom smashes, cymbal washes and the geometric patterns and rolls that never seem to land in the same place twice. Before this night I had not been familiar with Matt Garrison (who is also DeJohnette’s godson); he was the group’s link to our technological present. He is an exceptionally nimble player, even a little show-offy a la Jaco Pastorius. His bass guitar was fed into any number of effects thru his onstage laptop and his loops and overlays were a continual source of enjoyment.

Here’s a great 9-minute piece from 2016, promoting the release of the trio’s “In Movement” album but also showing the deep inter-generational connections that has made this project so special. Nice interviews and good snippets of the album, which is not up on YouTube. So buy it!

It was Ravi Coltrane who was the evening’s wild card. He was the only of the three that I had seen live before, as part of an ace quintet led by another John Coltrane alumnus: pianist McCoy Tyner, the only one of that classic quartet that is still with us. I knew Ravi (who looks just like the old man) to be a talented but somewhat subdued saxophonist, as if he were careful not to be seen mimicking his father’s outsized legacy. But all that went out the two-story window that night and he channeled his dad’s intense and passionate playing style that always emanated from a deep spiritual center. Switching throughout the night between tenor, soprano and sopranino, he shined on “In Movement,” gliding over the tune’s metronomic rhythm and he impressively cut loose on “Cop-Out,” the set’s one foray into traditional up-tempo bebop.

Ravi Coltrane (left) performing with Matthew Garrison (center) and Jack DeJohnette (right) in October. Coltrane is nominated for Best Improvised Jazz Solo at the 2017 Grammy Awards for the title track from In Movement, recorded with Garrison and DeJohnette

The cathartic applause by the rather upscale audience (big plus: no up-raised smart phones!) at the end of the first set said a lot about the impact of this music. We repaired to the 3rd floor reception room for drinks and a chance to catch our collective breath. Early on after the intermission, as darkness descended on the Back Harbor backdrop, came another musical peak in an evening filled with them. The trio started into the ethereal Miles Davis ballad “Blue in Green,” from his landmark album Kind of Blue, on which John Coltrane first gained widespread recognition. Here, with DeJohnette back on piano, the band magnified the popular original with a new fluid arrangement over which Ravi blew a magnificently expressive solo on soprano sax, honoring his father’s presence (on tenor sax) from the 1959 original recording. The room seemed to be in a state of suspended animation—to the point where, for a few precious out-of-body moments, I felt I was watching John Coltrane himself (what did they put in my beer?).

After I was eased off the wing of a musical angel and back into my seat the show went on in a slightly more earthbound manner. Matt Garrison got a solo showcase that was giddy with virtuosic excitement and Jack ended the proceedings with a definitive smack on his snare drum that put a full-stop exclamation point on an enchanting ride that had to end somewhere. As the trio stood at center stage, the septuagenarian leader flanked by his two surrogate sons gracefully acknowledging the standing ovation, the whole spirit of this night came together in a late-breaking attestation to the everlasting virtue of both music and family. Not necessarily just kinfolk of course, but as DeJohnette put it in the liner notes to the group’s 2016 album In Movement, “we are connected at a very high and extremely personal level.” And as with all great art, that feeling extends to the beholder of it as well, and to the artist’s contemporaries, too. This is the great paying forward of world culture and is needed now more than ever, in this pitiless planet that grows more uncertain by the day, even hour.

Of course, we all had to walk back into that world after the show, but I tempered that disappointment by picking up In Movement on CD a week later. This is not only a great keepsake of a show that will live well in my memory (yes, their versions of “Blue in Green” and “Alabama” are on it) but for that ineffable spirit I described, of a work that spreads its love around: there are titles like “Lydia” (for DeJohnette’s wife), “Two Jimmys” (Garrison and Hendrix), and “Rashied” for Rashied Ali, Coltrane’s drummer from 1966 until John died the year later (Ravi’s mom, pianist Alice Coltrane, was also in that band). A beautiful album by beautiful people in a time when it is so sorely needed.

A boat’s-eye view of the Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport, Mass.