Update 2 – more notices:
Jazz Times obituary
Said saxophonist Joe Lovano, who worked often with Motian over the past three decades, “Paul was a strong, charismatic character, with a lot of energy and passion. He had a complete sphere of energy that you can hear in his playing, which could shift and change moods in a nanosecond. He was very serious and funny at the same time. He was a beautiful, creative soul, with so much love and passion.”
Allaboutjazz.com obiturary
Emerging first as a member of pianist Bill Evans’ groundbreaking trio in the mid-1950s, Motian went on to become an innovator in his own right, creating a style of drumming that was as much about implication and suggestion as it was overt pulse and groove. Texture and color were paramount from a drummer who, in addition to recording in groups like pianist Keith Jarrett’s vastly influential American Quartet of the 1970s, with bassist Charlie Haden and saxophonist Dewey Redman, went on to create his own vast discography.
Though little known outside jazz circles, his career, well over five decades long, helped change the role of drums in jazz. His deep internal sense of swing, and the beauty he could create from colorful, occasionally spare accents, made him among the most respected musicians in his field.
Notice from the New York Times website:
Paul Motian, a drummer, bandleader, and composer of grace and abstraction, and one of the most influential jazz musicians of the last 50 years, died early Tuesday morning at Mount Sinai Hospital in NewYork. He was 80 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications of myelodisplastic syndrome, a bone-marrow disorder, said his friend, Carole d’Inverno Frisell.
Mr. Motian was a living connection to some of the groups of the past that informed what jazz sounds like today: he had been in Bill Evans’s great trio in the late 1950s and early 1960s, playing on the albums “Waltz for Debby” and “Sunday at the Village Vanguard,” and in Keith Jarrett’s American quartet during the 1970s.
But it was in the second half of his life that Mr. Motian found himself as a composer and a bandleader, and his own work took off.
Damn.