Steve Coleman, his former employer and still a great admirer, remembers hearing Taborn play at the Village Vanguard, where he was leading a trio with Gerald Cleaver and Thomas Morgan. He was astonished by the degree of innovation that he was hearing. “It’s finally going to happen for Craig,” he recalled thinking. “He’s making a real contribution, he’s not just doing a gig, and you can say that about only a small handful of people.” The trio toured widely and made a brilliant album, “Chants,” but Taborn soon went back to his work as a sideman, joining the bassist Dave Holland’s band. “Momentum is the real thing, and you can gain momentum in a situation, like he had with Gerald and Thomas,” Coleman said. “But you can’t recreate something once the time is past.”

When I mentioned this argument to Taborn, he conceded that Coleman had a point about focusing on your own work, and said he “might be on the verge of doing just that.” But he added: “I’m not always sure what momentum is, exactly. I’m not always sure where people think they’re going and if they ever get there, anyway. To some extent I think it’s all an illusion.”

What Taborn means, I think, is that he is deeply involved in his process, no matter what music, or rather whose music, he’s performing. As he sees it, his body of work includes the music he has made as a sideman as much as his music as a leader. What matters — all that matters, really — is his presence in the moment of musical creation; the rest is commentary. If this attitude seems a little perplexing to some, it’s because we live in an age of incessant commentary, when instrumental music invariably is discussed in relation to personality and worldly ambition, or some nonmusical experience, culture or history that it supposedly reflects or expresses. As if music without words weren’t enough; as if it could refer to something beyond itself.

I still had trouble imagining that Taborn’s process could be so simple, so pure and self-​sacrificing. After all, a lot of musicians pay lip service to these ideas. Was it really possible to live them? Surely there must be some secret, a story that might expose, or at least account for, this surrender to the process of music making. Yet I’ve come to believe that if Taborn has a secret, it’s hiding in plain sight: his faith in what Stravinsky called music’s “essential being,” its radical self-sufficiency, its nonreferential nature. Taborn has remained loyal to this principle, sometimes at the expense of his own career. His apparent selflessness may seem strange, but the whole point of his process has been to avoid projecting “a self,” for the sake of a higher musical goal. This is what other musicians find so compelling and yet so peculiar — so mysterious — about him. It’s what makes Taborn’s musician friends highly protective of him, as if to speak about anything other than his music would be tantamount to betrayal.

Taborn’s musician friends were, in fact, so unforthcoming about (or simply unaware of) his life offstage that I asked a fellow writer, his friend Wendy Walters, whether she could tell me something about him that didn’t pertain directly to his music. She thought about it for a minute. Several years ago, she said finally, when Walters was going through a difficult divorce, Taborn sent her a witch-hazel tree, a breed that blooms in winter. The tree reminded her of Taborn’s relationship to his practice, and his need for solitude. “Music is almost life-giving for him. It’s the way he survives the things we’re trying to deal with.”

A few days later, I asked Taborn what he meant by the gift.

“Wendy’s house was beginning to feel like a cell in many ways, and it was uncertain when or if she would be in a position to move,” he remembered. “I thought it would be good to have something in the yard that would blossom with color. It was symbolic of hope, renewal and healing.” He paused. “But Wendy is, I think, hitting on something deeper about why I make music. All the things people say when they talk about music have to do with entertainment, or some kind of aesthetic advancement. Yet when they talk about how music moves them, they talk about other things: feelings, times of life, etc. So I suppose that for me, music is one of the things we use to get ourselves through life.” By giving Walters a tree that had not yet blossomed, he was giving her not so much a thing as a process, and waiting for it to reveal itself, to blossom with color over time, was central to realizing its mysterious power. “The witch-hazel tree was doing the same thing that a piece can do. Just saying: Here is this piece of music that you can have and listen to, and enjoy. Some day it may blossom for you, and you may find that it gives you something that you may not even know you need.”