There's a remarkable photograph - heartening, you might say - in the album insert to Michael Brecker's farewell recording, Pilgrimage, which was made last September, five months before the hugely influential saxophonist died of leukaemia. Jack DeJohnette, the drummer on the session, has his head bent against Brecker's chest, apparently checking for a heartbeat. The saxophonist is smiling, guest pianist Herbie Hancock erupting into a gale of laughter. Everyone knew, of course, that this would be Brecker's last recording.
He wasn't sure until the day of the session if he'd be strong enough to go through with it. In the event, he played with all the ferocious momentum and melodic ingenuity he'd been famous for since the 1970s, and on reflective pieces with a fragility that had been an evolving quality of his since the turn of the millennium. Guitarist Pat Metheny, who played on the album, called it "one of the great codas in modern music history". Certainly the unscheduled collective jam that forms the finale of the best track, Tumbleweed (currently the welcome music on Brecker's homepage) has the kind of exhilarating spontaneity and all-of-one-mind uplift that's at the heart of why jazz-lovers are jazz-lovers, and which is rarely caught in a recording studio.
Hearing it put me in mind of a conversation I'd had with Michael Brecker shortly after 9/11. He'd been playing a New York club season when it happened, and his first reaction had been to consider cancelling the shows out of respect, and because "playing was the last thing I felt like doing then". But by the end of the week he and his group were back on the bandstand, the smell of the destruction hanging in the air, playing the gigs as benefits for the emergency services, and discovering "that I maybe felt in touch with the true purposes of music in a way I never had been before - as a hearing, transporting, unifying force".
Some of the episodes on Pilgrimage - with artists like Metheny, DeJohnette, Brad Mehldau and Hancock playing at the outer limits of their skills - are resounding testaments to that. Brecker also used his music and his global reputation in his last year to campaign for raised awareness about bone-marrow donation (the information is on his website), source of the only treatment that could have saved him. A modest man, with a realistic sense of what music can and can't achieve in an unbalanced world, Brecker never oversold either his own importance in the great scheme of things, or his art's. But what he said to me about his illustrious predecessors John Coltrane and Miles Davis during that 9/11 conversation certainly stands for him too. "Miles and Trane were inspirations to all of us," Brecker said. "For their music, but not just for that - for their courage as human beings, which allowed them to make that music. But whatever they did, they allowed people in on it. It's a musical spirit I try as hard as I can to live by."
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