FROM THE LINER NOTES - It’s gratifying to see current bandleaders address the hybridity inherent in jazz by dealing with the music of Shostakovich, Webern, Ligeti and Machaut, among others. For Boston-based guitarist Eric Hofbauer, who in recent years has confronted monumental works by Stravinsky, Messiaen and Charles Ives on Prehistoric Jazz,

FROM THE LINER NOTES - It’s gratifying to see current bandleaders address the hybridity inherent in jazz by dealing with the music of Shostakovich, Webern, Ligeti and Machaut, among others. For Boston-based guitarist Eric Hofbauer, who in recent years has confronted monumental works by Stravinsky, Messiaen and Charles Ives on Prehistoric Jazz, Vols. 1-3, the goal was not a melding of genres or a salute to “serious” music in general, but rather a puzzling over matters of timbre and instrumentation, improvisational pathways and harmonic implications specific to these composers. The orchestrations were rigorous yet everywhere was the spark of the unexpected. Hofbauer’s take on the encounter of European modernism with the America of blues and jazz follows in the best tradition of Joplin, Ellington and all that came after.

“Prehistoric jazz” is a term Leonard Bernstein once used in reference to Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps. Hofbauer took the concept and ran with it in his account of that piece as well as Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and Ives’ Three Places in New England. Ives’ Americanness was salient: his appropriation of plantation songs, military marches and other vernacular sources was itself jazz-like. And Three Places, inspired as it was by Revolutionary and Civil War monuments as well as natural scenes in and around Ives’ native Connecticut, amounted to a meditation on America’s past and future — something about which jazz has quite a lot to say.

These themes emerge again on Prehistoric Jazz, Vol. 4, devoted to Duke Ellington’s 1935 masterpiece Reminiscing in Tempo. Duke wrote this piece soon after the death of his mother, with whom he was very close — a detail that led Hofbauer to hear this music as a reflection on “memory as a catalyst for change.”

The moving extended work had to fill two 78-rpm records, front and back, so it’s generally spoken of as a four-part extended composition. In Hofbauer’s reading, it unfolds as a continuous piece without timestamps for the different sections, prompting us to hear the music differently. According to Hofbauer, Prehistoric Jazz, Vol. 4 “is the closest I’ve come to employing the technical demands of my solo-guitar conception as heard on the American trilogy or Ghost Frets, but in the quintet setting.”

Duke’s original was just under 13 minutes; this version is just under 25. The piece was originally conceived with no improvisation. But Hofbauer’s reading does entail some “blowing”: “I’m using the improvisations as a compositional tool. It happens in sections where I’m choosing to stay in a harmonic and/or rhythmic space that is important to explore further.” Spread out through the entire piece we first hear a cello solo, then trumpet, then an extended solo-guitar passage, then drums, then clarinet and finally collective improvisation. “Each solo is a departure,” Hofbauer adds, “but still serves the overall flow, and narrative of the original, just expanding it to make room for personal statements by each quintet member and to focus on our group interplay.”