By Jon Garelick

Pianist Ran Blake’s performance was like a long dreamscape of personal reflection and meditation.

Ran Blake at sound check before the concert at the Regattabar. Photo: Jared Sims

How many times have you gone to a jazz concert where a highlight of the show was a solo-piano interpretation of the themes from the film Vertigo?

I’d venture you’ve had that experience only if you’re a follower of Ran Blake. Blake, now 89, is founder and former chair of the New England Conservatory’s historically crucial Third Stream department (now called Contemporary Musical Arts). At NEC, he’s been a kind of guru to generations of NEC students, known for his exacting methods of ear training (described in his book The Primacy of the Ear), and his love of film noir, which he has used as the basis for teaching a kind of musical form of cinematic storyboarding as a method of improvisation.

The Boston Globe’s Kevin Lowenthal previewed Friday’s show at the Regattabar as a “solo piano séance,” and he wasn’t wrong — Blake, brought to the stage in a wheelchair, sat in near-total darkness, and for roughly the next 90 minutes created a montage of shifting themes, never varying from ballad tempos, colored with a mix of rich, harmonically evocative chording and delicate single-note lines of melody. It was like a long dreamscape of personal reflection and meditation.

Unusual for jazz shows, but typical of Blake, a printed program was provided. Called “Ghosts: Orchestral Noir,” it was divided into two sets, “Ghosts” and “Film Noir,” the first dedicated to friends, associates, and musical heroes (Ornette Coleman, Billy Strayhorn, George Gershwin, George Russell, and Mal Waldron), the latter name-checking films or film characters (“Bunny Lake,” “The Pawnbroker,” “Dr. Mabuse,” “Laura”). The first half also included a Blake original, “Gaza,” reflecting his abiding concerns with world events and human rights.

But the announced program was used up by the one-hour mark, and from there Blake proceeded without pause, as he did for the whole show (he spoke to the audience only once, after the first set), to Thelonious Monk’s “Panonica,” a couple of pieces from singer Abbey Lincoln’s book (another of his heroes), other pieces that segued in and out of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and two from the Jackson 5 — “I’ll Be There” and “Never Can Say Goodbye.” And, yes, “Vertigo.”

Aside from the piece dedicated to Mal Waldron (written by Blake student and collaborator Caleb Schmale), none of the pieces were announced. “Ornette Coleman” quoted Coleman’s “Lonely Woman,” “George Gershwin” had a bit of “I Loves You, Porgy,” and Billy Strayhorn (dedicated to the singer Chris Connor) included “Take the A Train” and “Lush Life.” But it would take better ears than mine to pick out any particular themes by George Russell from the tune named for him or to know where the following tune, “Gaza,” began or left off for the Set I–closing “Mal Waldron.” (Both were new and unknown to me.)

For the Blake fan, the musical palette was familiar: the extreme chiaroscuro of film noir, expressed in sharply contrasting dynamic shifts from loud to soft, tart dissonance to sweet consonance, deep rumbles in the bass register and high tinkling treble.

The opening “Coleman” theme was emblematic — a sharp, annunciatory dissonant chord, followed by a softer minor-key response, and then the opening phrase of “Lonely Woman,” which in this context took on a somewhat apprehensive cast, rising and hanging unresolved.

Throughout the night, it was startling again to be reminded of Blake’s unique approach to melody. You could call it staccato — he likes to stab individual notes, hard, and give them space. But how then to account for the tensile strength of those melodic lines, the arc of melody as clearly supported as if it were being sung by Connor or Frank Sinatra? I can only ascribe the legato effect to Blake’s unerring sense of rhythmic phrasing.

And then there are those chords. Somewhere, someday, someone is going to write an analysis (based on painstaking transcription, no doubt) of Blake’s voice-leading, the inner movements of one chord to the next, proceeding in some instances to a resolving note that seems to have landed on some impossible microtone — between the piano keys.

The chordal effects are enhanced by Blake’s unparalleled (at least in jazz) use of the sustain and damper pedals — chords melt into each other, or hang behind a melodic phrase like a lingering ghost. (The program title in this case is almost literal.)

The subtitle of the program, “Orchestral Noir,” reminded me again of Blake’s orchestral effects. A bass-register chord that accompanied the gentle melody of “Bunny Lake” had the effect of an organ tone. Elsewhere (“The Pawnbroker”? “Laura”?), I could swear that a high-lying chordal passage conjured a string section.

As you can probably tell, this was not “jazz swing.” Blake’s rhythms were often marked with a softly assenting 4/4 in the left hand (and maybe one bit of ¾ in the Monk). He didn’t necessarily play an entire “song,” but would circle back to melodic bits as touchstones, the recurring motifs of the film that was running in his head. His shifts from stark shards of dissonant fragments or ambiguous clusters to consoling melodic phrases or explicit minor chords were consistently affecting, especially in Lincoln’s “Throw It Away.” And the “narrative” of the stabbing multiple themes from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s Vertigo was surprisingly chilling. (What, that old thing? Yes.) In “Never Can Say Goodbye,” he kept returning to the verse that begins, “Every time I think I’ve had enough/I start heading for the door.” Often as not, he would repeat a melody line as an extended decrescendo, like a slow fade-out.

Blake’s book Storyboarding Noir (coauthored with Gard Hartmann) begins with an epigraph from Abbey Lincoln: “We can only speak the truth when we turn down the light.” Blake’s own introductory epigraph concludes, “I don’t write film music because I don’t write easily. But I can turn down the light, and let the images flicker.”

In this case the musical images in that dark room cast an unbroken spell for close to 90 minutes.

Jon Garelick is a writer living in Somerville, MA. He can be reached at garelickjon@gmail.com.