" data-original-title="" title="">Wayne Shorter, in the finest of his performance I'd ever heard—playing up his suits as composer and soloist by meshing his free-wheeling quartet and the score-heeding Imani Winds. And then, in another corner, as part of the late night haunt of the Salle du Gesu series where much of the festival's meatier music takes place, another clear highlight of the festival rang out, true and bold: David Binney came out with his solid quartet, wailing and brooding, locked into the provocative evocations of his unique writing and seizing multiple "aha" moments as a player.

Shorter and Binney stole the show that year, in my mind, and the artistic links between them are greater than first impressions might suggest. Both saxists have honed their artistic personae through a passionate and singular way with both horn and pen (or mouse), and both have trail blazed subtle pathways of expression and embraced melodic/harmonic roads less taken. They are neither avant-garde or mainstream, and generally dodging anything akin to dogma or ism. They are who they are, and getting deeper so.

This delicate yet binding balance is something we hear plenty of on Binney's third Criss Cross album, Barefooted Town, a work bristling with intelligence and energy on many levels. Plus heart: Binney blows mightily, as one who must be called of the great alto saxists of our time, and his writing can be tough and artfully knotty, but he is also an inveterate romantic, on his own terms. From the compact suite that is the opening tune, "Dignity," with its yearning vocal part by the leader at the end, through the muscular impressionism of title track and the angularly balladic finale, "Once, When She Was Here," this song set tells heartfelt stories we can sense, through the prism of abstraction.

Joining the leader in this sextet context are allies old and new, all sensitive to what Binney is about. We know to expect empathic interplay from Binney's longtime collaborator