Who What Jazz Where Why

"Traffic from uptown was really a horror," Michael Powers muttered on Halloween night, when he appeared an hour late at Terra Blues, as he does frequently on Mondays.

Outside, Bleecker Street was full of parade stragglers. Inside, a gaggle at the bar was talking loudly. Half a dozen folks at tables were ready to listen if Powers would start. His erstwhile guitar-and-harmonica sidekick essayed a Robert Johnson version of "Sweet Home Chicago," killing time, and there was a man between them, set to shuffle with brushes on a solitary snare.

I hadn't heard of Powers before. But on the web I found that he has released one album, Onyx Root, which was nominated for 2004 W.C. Handy Blues Awards for Best New Artist Debut and Contemporary Blues Album of the Year.

If the CD is like his live set, the nominations were well-deserved. Powers is no kid, walks with a cane, and doesn't seem temperamentally like the sort to push through horrible traffic even when he's got a gig. His blues feel is genuine though. His voice is burry with a pure, high yearning at its core, and his guitar playing is deft, soft and surprisingly rangy.

It's the thing now for blues musicians to include soul and pop songs in their repertoire, and Powers offered an unaccompanied improvisation on Hendrix's "Little Wing," starting abstractly then finding his way into a flamenco zone which he explored at length, segueing smoothly back to the tune at the end. His tone throughout was bemused, as if he were singing to himself. Given the volume of the bar talk and the sparseness of a real audience, he may as well have been. To turn "Little Wing" into a bittersweet recollection of someone or something unattainable is to be blue, without a doubt.

Yet there's little such masculine vulnerability on display in New York City, and to come across it unexpectedly is to stumble on a nook where it's safe to momentarily lay one's burdens down. Who knew that this would be at Terra Blues?

Another surprise and a different sound can be encountered at Plan B, which is on the ground floor of a brownstone on E. 10th St. across from Tompkins Square Park. It looks like a private club given its blacked-out front window and velvet rope before the door. But there's nothing fancy about the place though-no exclusion policy, no cover charge, and inside on a recent Friday night there was a grungy living room-style party going on. People with drinks were in the alcove with comfy seating, there was a happy crowd at the bar (and though there was little light, a dude was painting a canvas), and at a space amidst all was one white-hot trio.

The band Consider the Source-Gabriel Marin, guitar; John Ferrar, bass and Justin Ahiyon, drums-is not a year old but has the juice of this moment, using Middle Eastern motifs as a launching pad for maniacal electric jams that suggest they've just come back from Iraq and can't wait to demonstrate what exhilaration amid chaos sounds like. I was alerted to them by Marin's dad Craig, a puppeteer responsible for George Carlin's "Shining Time Station" kids TV show, who hyped the trio as "the next Mahavishnu."

They're not that exactly-Ferrar's finger-popping on his bass is extraordinarily fast and furious, but all in solid 4/4 rather than McLaughlinesque odd meters, and Ahiyon drives the three with a loose clatter, not Billy Cobham like power tom-tomming. Also, Gabriel Marin when he came to ecstatic climaxes reminded me of Jimmy Page in the earliest Led Zepplin days. But it was all good, fast fun. Like jazz should be, right?