A piece of the interaction

Drummer Brian Blade takes a unique approach to all of his collaborations

Brian Blade's musical experiences go well beyond his jazz ensemble, the Brian Blade Fellowship, and include relationships with the likes of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Daniel Lanois.

OAKLAND, Calif. - Offstage, drummer Brian Blade moves with an unhurried grace redolent of his Southern upbringing in Shreveport, La. Lanky and loose-limbed, gentle and soft spoken, he radiates a calm, quiet confidence.

Onstage, Blade is all coiled concentration, leaning over the trap set like a high diver at the moment before a plunge, his mouth open as if to catch every possible vibration emanating from his bandmates. He has every reason for his poise and sense of purpose.

At 38, Blade has carved out a singular career with a boggling array of musical relationships reaching far beyond jazz, from Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell to Daniel Lanois.

At the same time, his supremely expressive drum work has powered saxophone legend Wayne Shorter's protean quartet (which plays the Berklee Performance Center on Dec. 3). What's most remarkable is how in his own band, the Brian Blade Fellowship, he manages to encompass all his musical experiences with a body of original music that owes as much to gospel and song forms as to Shorter's rarified harmonic vocabulary.

"The influence of Joni and Bob's music is so profound and important to me," said Blade, who performs with the Fellowship at Scullers on Thursday. "I want our music to have that urgency and clarity. Hopefully you receive joy from it; that's the most important thing."

While Shorter's music requires an assertive, volatile approach, Blade has honed a very different aesthetic in the Fellowship ensemble. Featuring Melvin Butler on tenor and soprano sax, Myron Walden on bass clarinet and alto sax, pianist/keyboardist Jon Cowherd, and Roland Guerin filling in for Chris Thomas on acoustic bass, the band plays beautiful, spacious music that often feels like an aural extension of Blade's easy, rolling stride.

Rather than opening with a theme that leads to a cycle of solos, the melodies unfurl at a measured pace, and when a musician slides to the foreground, he concentrates on advancing the tune's story. As much a group dynamic as a compositional strategy, the approach has steadily evolved since the Fellowship's eponymous 1998 debut on Blue Note, a span in which the band has maintained the same core membership.

"We've got the trust to make a group sound, to make a collective cry," Blade said in an interview backstage after an Oakland performance with Shorter last month. "There's more structure in what we're doing than the music I play with Wayne. Playing songs can be as urgent and passionate as playing something extemporaneous and unscripted. A statement of melody can be an improvisatory expression in itself.

"What you're struck with at the end of the trip is a feeling. It's not that you don't need a concept. You do, but I like it to develop organically from playing together. In the end the chemistry, the interaction between people, will develop the big picture."

No player has been more important to the Fellowship's big picture than pianist Cowherd, who traces his relationship with Blade back to the late 1980s, when they met as students at Loyola University in New Orleans. While Lanois produced Fellowship's debut, Cowherd and Blade coproduced the follow-up, 2000's "Perceptual" (Blue Note), and the band's long-awaited third release, "Season of Changes," which came out on Verve in April. The pianist also composed two of the album's most arresting tunes, including the 12-minute title track, which grew out of his study of a Bach chorale. "It seemed to be a great way to start the tune," Cowherd said. "I put a little interlude from that melody, and then I came up with another section, and it just kept getting longer and longer."

Another thread running through Blade's musical life over the past decade is his deep creative connection to Lanois, a gifted singer-songwriter and guitarist best known as a 10-time Grammy-winning producer with credits ranging from U2 to Emmylou Harris. Their friendship became a part of Lanois's travelogue documentary "Here Is What Is." One Christmas, Lanois visited Blade and his family in Shreveport and ended up filming a service at the Zion Baptist Church, where Blade first performed on drums and his father is pastor. (Blade will accompany Lanois on Nov. 16 at Berklee Performance Center, the first event in a three-day residency at the school.)

"It's great to be involved in his world," Blade said. "We play duo a lot and it's great to have that freedom. I can deliver the right things for each song."

Whether using sticks, mallets, brushes, or his bare hands, Blade always seems to know exactly what's needed at any particular musical moment. It's why his musical world intersects with some of the century's definitive artists, and his own band has forged a sound unlike any other in jazz.