The jazz pianist Craig Taborn opened his early set at the Village Vanguard on Wednesday with “American Landscape,” or at least you will agree to call it that because some sweet, curious, almost Ellingtonian stuff swimming through it also distinguished a much shorter piece of that name he recorded in 2001, on the album “Light Made Lighter.”

Mr. Taborn has had a career for nearly 20 years with Steve Coleman, James Carter, Roscoe Mitchell, Tim Berne, David Binney and a lot of others, but this is his first week as a bandleader at the Vanguard. If there’s any danger that his music is going to harden into one specific thing — a style, even of his own — he seems to go the other way. He destabilizes any traditional framing idea — of a set, of a song, of a chorus — but with the assurance of a really good frame builder.

“American Landscape” went on for 40 minutes, past at least one potentially gorgeous place to stop. It made flickering connections to older ideas of jazz ballads and jazz piano trios — including, most clearly, those of Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett and Cecil Taylor — but didn’t use them superficially.

It was patient and compulsive, light and dense, full of little gaps but not fragmentary; it had reassuring blues language and quickened abstraction and passages of almost digital-sounding phrase repetition. However you describe it, it was also something very different. (Hear it yourself: the piece was broadcast live and archived on WBGO and npr.org.)

The other members of the trio divided their attention between consensual song-making and their own patterns. Thomas Morgan played short ideas all over the range of the bass, in big, calm, resonant notes. Gerald Cleaver’s drum rhythms sometimes locked right into Mr. Taborn’s right hand and a feeling of slow swing, then went somewhere else, following his individual logic. Continually, they all came together closely and pulled apart widely.

What else was there to say after “American Landscape”? Mr. Taborn played some solo piano, which developed into another trio piece. And then he started into a jagged broken-meter tune, overlapping melodies with two hands, something recognizably new and recognizably jazz; the others jumped in.

A few minutes later he was playing two single notes, an octave-and-a-half apart, and letting them ring with sustain for five or seven seconds each, long enough to make you contemplate time and the universe. (The latter part was spare but not severe; it kept changing slightly, shaped and pulled on by the other players.) Where had the tune gone? It wasn’t at all clear how he’d gotten there, where and when he made the shift; there was no landmark or signal. You want to say that it was like hearing two different pianists, except that both are Mr. Taborn down to the root.

The set’s mystery came with a group sound. The music was calm and practiced and shared; the band operated such that you could hear all three musicians more or less on their own terms.

These gigs are a personal first, but also a band first: this trio has toured for several years but never played in New York, its hometown, before. And the performance felt serious, like the landing of something that might last and expand. But will we keep knowing what it is, and knowing what we’re looking for? Is it containable enough, recognizable enough? Is it a thing? (Ben Ratliff, The New York Times)