Butch Morris started out as a working cornet player, the kind of guy you'd find on records by David Murray and other downtown New York improvisers in the 1970s and 80s. He was good at it. But somewhere along the way he got more interested in a different question: what if you could shape a group improvisation the way a conductor shapes an orchestra, without writing anything down and without killing the spontaneity that makes improvised music exciting in the first place?

The answer he came up with was conduction. He developed a vocabulary of gestures — specific hand and baton signals that told musicians to sustain a note, repeat a phrase someone just played, change dynamics, shift key, or stop cold. The musicians were still improvising. Morris was just steering the raft. It sounds like a gimmick until you hear it work, and when it works it sounds like a big band that's somehow also a free jazz quartet, locked in and loose at the same time.

He spent decades refining this with ensembles in New York, Europe, and Japan, pulling in players from wildly different backgrounds — straight-ahead guys, noise musicians, classical players who'd never improvised a note in their life. That was part of the appeal for him. Conduction didn't care what school you came from, it just needed you to watch his hands and react fast. His album Dust to Dust (1991) gives a decent sense of the sound — dense, shifting, never quite settling into a groove you'd expect, but never chaotic either.

Morris wasn't trying to replace composition or improvisation. He was trying to find a third thing, a live editing process happening in real time. It's a strange, specific idea, and he spent most of his career explaining it to skeptical musicians and skeptical critics who assumed it was either too controlling to be real jazz or too loose to be real composition. He didn't convince everyone. But the people who got it — and there were a lot of serious improvisers who did — treated him as someone solving a real problem nobody else had quite figured out how to approach.

If you want a way into Morris, don't go looking for a great cornet solo record. That's not really what he left behind. Go looking for the ensemble recordings where you can hear a dozen different musical personalities getting pulled into shape by one guy standing in front of them with his hands moving. It's a strange thing to listen to, and it's also kind of the whole point.