The strongest voice in the run was Marc Ribot’s. His playing during these weeks was spectacular, full of unpredictable but seamless jumps between subtlety and lunacy, riffs dropped in behind the beat at just the right spots and pared down in a way that suggested single notes plucked out and silenced at the moment of creation. Even in a short solo, he had a way of creating a bubble, a little musical world with its own harmonics, rhythm, and atmosphere, a thing that was internally perfectly consistent, and yet he'd still surprise you on multiple levels from one moment to the next. He could do this by himself, but when the whole band was together in creating that bubble world, he had a lot more room to play, and when he has room, he takes incredible flights. With this cast of characters, of course, so does everyone else.

Before the event, the two most exciting casts were Bar Kokhba and the Masada quartet, but in the middles of solos on those nights it was impossible not to think about related and contrasting performances by the Masada String Trio, Masada Guitars, and Electric Masada, not to mention The Gift performance, the Zorn String Quartets, and even the Frith and Zorn improv session. And about the fact that it's unlikely all of this will ever be offered in one short month again. Perhaps the most poignant thing about it has been the way these musicians have gotten back together in these groupings and churned up all the old chemistry, with more brilliance in these performances than ever.

The night before the Bar Kokhba show Ribot had been on fire during the performance of The Gift, so my first impression was of the mellowness of the "chamber Masada" music. Joey Baron took a drum solo that was a treat, and the slow, minor bowed string chords that opened another piece brought out an abstract, contemplative side of the material. Mark Feldman’s solo was beautiful — he can make a violin sound like a wooden flute when he wants to. Percussionist Cyro Baptista came in with a jingly child’s wheely toy behind him, followed by what looked like a twisted flexible brake line that he managed to get a lot of high notes out of; this morphed into the bird calls and jungle noises he used during The Gift, and of course it all worked. There followed a quicker, tighter piece reminiscent of the precision and cleanness of the Masada String Trio. The craftsmanship on this one was lovely, from the open-voiced duet work of Feldman and Friedlander to Ribot’s Postizo-reminiscent sound.

The seventh chart started with some nice bass from Greg Cohen, Ribot playing over it. This was purely evocative — there were elements of surf guitar and some lounginess, but without the self-conscious irony you might expect from others; the evocations were kept at arm’s length. Greg Cohen’s solo work on this one was a treat — in fact, throughout the month he’s been consistently marvellous. The minimalism of their work together on this piece was the jewel of the set, although the finale wasn’t anything to scoff at: a fast 6/8 over drums and a repeating bass figure, in which Feldman and Friedlander spazzed off each other before Baron demonstrated, with his inimitable precision, how to go through drum skins. The guy can hit.

One of my most cherished downtown memories is of a night some years back at the Knit, sitting on one of their terrible chairs down in the front row, literally toe-to-toe with Dave Douglas when he took a solo during a Masada show that was staged on the floor. Good solos have a way of building on themselves for a while, but even the best of them tend either to lose their steam or to get sewn up with a resolution before they have a chance to. This solo didn’t do that — it just took off from its deceptively mellow, warbling beginning and kept building and building, carrying its themes to the next level and the next, and Zorn recognized what was going on and let it ride. I held my breath for a lot of it, unable to believe that this could go on much longer. But it went on a long time, and by the end of it Douglas was grinning around his mouthpiece, and he kept grinning for pretty much the rest of the night.

Something similar happened to Greg Cohen during one of the quartet sets, the only substantive difference being that I don’t know if Zorn had planned to let him ride all along. When he started a solo during their fifth piece, I found myself hoping he’d play on — extended bass solos arent' heard often enough — and he did, a long excursion with impressive thematic unity, great force, and enormous creativity. He grinned, too. I expect this one will hang in my memory next to the Douglas solo.

There were, of course, other musical biscuits during the night. The set opened with Zorn blowing a smooth, lyrical solo that for the longest time was entirely lacking in squawks and his other trademark elements, so much so that I might not have have recognized the player if I’d had a blindfold on (though I couldn’t have missed the composer) — or so I thought, until he broke loose and Zorned, just in time to be joined by a screaming Dave Douglas. Their playing was as dynamic and give-and-take as ever, full of the way-too-late-20th-Century counterpoint peculiar to these two. The kind of stuff we’d be tempted to trot Bach out to see if he were to reappear, just to get his take, though I suppose if he did come back he’d be worn ragged by all the demands of cliché-prone reviewers who wanted to bring him along — but still, he should hear this stuff.

The whole group was in similar top form, guiding a warm full sound through the songbook: a tight, driven, whaling Baron/Cohen exchange before the head chart of the second tune; a nice Baron brush solo in the third (one that the String Trio had also done); free-form, all-out Zorn and Douglas solos in the fourth. The sixth was all about the drums, and there was another excellent sax solo in the improvisational seventh. We even clapped an encore out of them, an atmospheric tune that grew out of dirge-like opening chords.

I would have liked to review Electric Masada, but the sound knocked the pen out of my hand. All that percussion: Joey Baron, Cyro Baptista, Kenny Wolleson, plus Ikue Mori on electronics. Just watching Baptista was worth the price of admission. Everything he picks up, in his disarming way, he turns out to be a master of. You could hand the guy two packets of sugar and a Dixie cup and he'd outperform most musicians on their chosen instruments. The comparable night had been The Gift, with Joey, Cyro, and Roberto Rodriguez. That material is much more repetitive, but repetition is sometimes a big part of what percussionists do, and if you listened to any of the musicians in either of these combos playing over one rhythm all night long — or one chord, for that matter — you’d never get bored. Electric Masada charts are more rhythmically and harmonically complex, of course, and Zorn and Ribot, along with Jamie Saft and the apparently-born-with-an-electric-bass-in-his-hands Trevor Dunn, delivered a musical Cuchulainn’s Warp Spasm, a full-spectrum exploding train wreck of sound. Wish I could have held on to my pen.

It was a spectacular month. Pardon the gushing tone of this review, but I went to these shows because I love this stuff, and they managed to blow the doors off even my expectations.