Even in an age when the mainstream is full of all kinds of esoterica, Cristina Pato has a particularly individualistic choice of axe: the Galician bagpipe. Her sound is wild, feral yet virtuosic and breathtakingly fast. She leads a similarly explosive band with accordion and a rhythm section. Fresh off a residency at Harvard, theYo-Yo Ma collaborator and member of the Silk Road Ensemble is bringing her deliriously fun, hard-hitting flamenco and Romany-tinged instrumentals to New York at Subculture tonight, May 17 at 7:30 PM. Cover is $25 and worth it: if you really want to wind up the weekend on a high note, this is how to do it.

Pato has a new album, Latina, a mix of shapeshifting numbers in a vast range of traditional Spanish rhythm, written by her bassist Edward Perez. The opening track, Prueba de Fuego – a fandango – is definitely a trial by fire. Jazz drummer Eric Doob pushes it with a brisk triplet rhythm until Pato goes spiraling into the stratosphere, then Perez takes a dancing solo, accordionist Victor Prieto adding some neat call-and-response lines. Maria Lando, a lando dance, has a slower groove like a staggered clave beat, the accordion adding a lushly wistful edge that Pato picks up with a raw, plaintive tone.

Pato plays precise, tensely suspenseful, hard-hitting, jazz-inflected piano on The High Seas, a dramatic tanguillo number: the mesh of textures between the piano and accordion is downright delicious. Muiñeira de Chantada, a simple, rustic oropo-festejo tune, gives Pato a long launching pad for wailing bends and machinegunning, trilling riffage. Pato goes back to piano for Currulao de Crisis, a vamping number that hints at reggae, then flamenco, then hits nn unexpectedly balmy interlude that’s pure jazz and picks up once again from there. Then she picks up her pipes again and bounces her way through the Spanish counterpart to a tarantella – lots of cross-pollination in that part of the world and on this album.

The lone cover here, Llegará, llegará, llegará, by Emilio Solla (who also has an excellent new album out) is a real epic. Prieto’s tango-tinged pulse anchors Pato’s lustrous upper-register flights over a galloping groove, up to a bustling piano pasage, then a lively, expansive accordion solo that hits a peak when Pato wails on the pipes again. The final cut is the joyously if somewhat acidally shuffling Let’s Festa, the closest thing to Romany jazz here. There’s also a bonus track, a take of the tarantella without Pato’s breathless explanation of how closely interrelated Italian and Spanish folk traditions are. Sanitized yuppie exotica this is not: Gipsy Kings, eat your hearts out.

The album’s jsut out, so it hasn’t hit the usual spots yet, but three of the tracks are up at Sunnyside Records‘ site.