Subtlety and Savagery From the Rhythm Method String Quartet at Roulette

This past evening’s performance by the Rhythm Method String Quartet at Roulette was a stunning display of fearsome extended technique and fearless programming. The American avant garde has a long and sometimes painfully precious tradition of art strictly for art’s sake – and this all-female quartet seem hell-bent on changing that. Beyond the concert’s transgressive themes, from Margaret Atwood dystopia to the struggles of women and immigrants, the segues between the works on the bill followed as well musically as they did thematically.

To what degree was this music successful in translating those ideas? Circling, repetitive phrases stopped and started unexpectedly, with syncopation that defied any attempt to predict it. Slowly and methodically, the group built momentum, a vividly recurrent trope throughout a series of works, mostly by the group themselves. A reflection on, say, how the Metoo movement has reached critical mass, or how gains for human rights won by previous generations built a foundation for today’s movements? Maybe. Whatever the case, there was plenty of suspense punctuated by drama…and a savagely conflagrational payoff at the end.

All of this pushed the limits of how a stringed instrument can be played. If there was a central theme, musically, it was flickery, slithering, whispery, silken textures punctuated by more emphatic gestures. all of them requiring minute inflections within the most delicate high harmonics.

The centerpiece was Lewis Nielson’s Le Journal du Corps, whose sepulchral wisps and poltergeist accents engaged not only the violins of Leah Asher and Marina Kifferstein but also Wendy Richman’s viola and Meaghan Burke’s cello. Subtly but matter-of-factly, the group developed a theme and variations that relied more on attack than melodic shifts, an illustration of an Aime Cesaire poem giving voice to the horrors endured by slaves, and their resilience against those injustices.

Kifferstein’s An Alien with Extraordinary Abilities foreshadowed that piece, notably with its herky-jerky, off-kilter rhythms, although melodically it was closer to horizontal music. Likewise, Asher’s Hollux Rey relied on rhythmic variations for its dynamics, an almost punishing maze of glissandos, plucks, squirrelly shivers and the occasional siren or doppler effect.

Everyone in the group sang, cool and calm, in contrast to the music’s flashes of agitation. Burke spent more time on the mic than anyone else since she’d contributed two pieces to the program, driving the music to a crescendo midway through. Her work as a soloist and bandleader is closer to the subversive cello rock of Rasputina or the stark grooves of the Icebergs, and this pair of alternately atmospheric and incisively propulsive tunes had a similarly sharp sense of melody. The first, Siren Song, referred to The Handmaid’s Tale and was the more serious. The second, Hysterie, was inspired by primitive medical attempts to cure hysteria, once thought to be exclusively a female malady. Burke got the crowd howling by revealing that doctors once employed primitive vibrators as a treatment: “Everybody wins…or maybe doesn’t win,” she mused.

The quartet encored with the incendiary shrieks and jet-engine trajectories of Kristin Bolstad‘s And Nobody Gets Everything Right, screaming their way through the intro – literally – and concluding with a fierce swordfight, Asher and Kifferstein duking it out with their bows. Asher won; the audience basically didn’t know what hit them.

The next concert at Roulette is April 3 at 8 PM with new music chamber group Tak Ensemble – with Kifferstein on violin once again – playing an all-Mario Diaz de Leon program including a New York premiere for bassoon and electronics and his 2016 Sanctuary suite. Advance tix are $20; there may be some sonic extremes but probably no swordfighting. 

Tarek Yamani at Lincoln Center: A Haunting, Ceaselessly Shapeshifting Vision of the Future of Piano Jazz

Playing to a rapt, sold-out, mostly under-30 crowd, Beirut-born pianist Tarek Yamani opened his Lincoln Center concert last night with an a cumulo-nimbus chordal crescendo and then took the band spiraling and rippling through a long, chromatically slashing series of variations on a hundred-year-old Egyptian classical melody. Bassist Sam Miniae danced between the raindrops as drummer Jean John boomed and rattled the rims, Yamani parsing the passing tones in the minor scale for every fraction of intensity he could find. From there the music rose and fell, sometime hypnotic, sometimes with an elegant neoromantic gleam, to a long, insistent peak. It was like witnessing peak-era 70s McCoy Tyner with more Middle Eastern influences.

Yamani’s distinctive style is a confluence of Arabian Gulf khaliji music and American jazz, with a healthy dose of Afro-Cuban groove as well. It’s no surprise that Yamani gravitated toward jazz, considering that khaliji sounds have more African swing than Levantine sway. It wouldn’t be outrageous to call the self-taught pianist and composer Beirut’s (and now New York)’s answer to Vijay Iyer.

Even so, it was impossible to predict how funky the night’s second number, Hala Land – a Nordic Latin Middle Eastern swing prelude of sorts – would get, from John’s irrepressible shuffle as Yamani teased the crowd with an easy resolution he wasn’t going to give in to anytime soon before pinwheeling and then icepicking through a subtly shifting series of Arabic modes. Yamani revealed afterward that although the melody is considered iconically Lebanese, its origins are actually Turkish. “It’s like falafel – it doesn’t really matter,” he grinned.

The night’s third number was an original in 10/8: “If you’d like to count, please do, but do it silent,” Yamani deadpanned. The blend of catchy Afro-Cuban acerbity, Middle Eastern otherworldliness and emphatic, punchy, ceaselessly shifting meters made sense considering that the pianist is also the author of a popular book on polyrhythms. Miniae ran circles and pounced, John gave it bounce and strut.

Ashur – named after the “Egyptian god of sex,” Yamani smiled – was a friendly, methodically crescendoing, wickedly memorable Kind of Blue-style theme and variations that John kicked off hard. Then Yamani completely flipped the script with an expansive take of Lush Life, subtly pushing it further and further toward the Middle East but finally opting for energetic wee-hours postbop lyricism. Then he launched into a tireless, grittily insistent arrangement of paradigm-shifting Egyptian composer Said Darwish’s workingman’s anthem The Melody of the Movers, circling and rippling over the rhythm section’s propulsive swing. 

The trio closed with a cantering detour toward Cuba and then a glisteningly jubilant melody that Yamani explained is claimed by pretty much every culture throughout the Levant. It was amazing how light and seemingly effortless Yamani’s touch remained after all the evening’s exertion.

Auspiciously, this concert was booked not by Lincoln Center but by their Student Advisory Council, whose agenda is to make the world of the arts in New York “a more inclusive and accessible space,” and help discover new talent who might be flying under the radar. Challenged to find an act worthy of the venue, third-year Juilliard percussion student Tyler Cunningham won the competition by suggesting Yamani after seeing the pianist listed on a bill at National Sawdust, where a friend works.  A specialist in symphonic percussion, the personable, articulate Cunningham gravitates toward postminimalist composers like Marcos Balter but has the kind of eclectic taste required in a field where he’s going to be asked to play outside the box more often than not. Cunningham also has a revealing interview with Yamani up at The Score, Lincoln Center’s online magazine.

The next show at Lincoln Center’s atrium space on Broadway just south of 63rd St. is this March 29 at 7:30 PM with Portuguese fado-jazz crooner/guitarist António Zambujo. The show is free; the earlier you get to the space, the better.

On Site Opera Revisit the Drama of a Horrific New York Conflagration

The action and intrigue rise toward fever pitch and then pretty much stay there for the duration of the On Site Opera production of Morning Star, currently enjoying a run at the Eldridge Street Synagogue. With a lively, cinematic score by Ricky Ian Gordon and book by the late Bill Hoffman, it follows the emotionally charged trajectory of a first-generation New York Jewish immigrant  family impacted by the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. In an era of fatal conflagrations at locked-in Wal-Marts staffed by immigrants, not to mention deadly infernos at highrise British council estates, it’s particularly timely. It also has surprisingly subtle implications concerning karmic consequences arising when the oppressed become oppressors themselves.

On March 25, 1911 a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist sweatshop at Washington Square East claimed the lives of 146 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, many in their teens. It was the deadliest single event on New York soil until 9/11. The public outcry for safety standards in the wake of the tragedy revolutionized building construction and fire prevention in this city and across the country as well.

The fire itself doesn’t factor into more than about five minutes of the two-act piece. There’s abundant historical context, including but not limited to insurgent women’s rights, immigrant rights and worker’s rights movements which mirror our own today. Set on the Lower East Side, there are also numerous references to both defunct and surviving landmarks that will bring a smile to anyone who’s ever lived in or knows the neighborhood.

The plot concerns a laundry list of family drama: the fire is the elephant in the room, a dead child – literally – whose absence casts a pall. Suspense builds as the fatal day approaches, with plenty of artful foreshadowing. Romantic and parent-child angst, along with possible questions of paternity and political allegiances, push the story along. The singers – in particular, Emily Pulley as the mom and Blythe Gaissert as bitter antagonist -are strong, because they have to be. Other than a couple of detours toward early 1900s vaudeville balladry, the music doesn’t have much in the way of dynamic shifts. There’s! No! Business! Like! Show! Business!

Gordon’s score bubbles and bustles with comfortably familiar tropes refined by years in the theatre. Cliffhanger moments get anxious tritones; romance gets effervescent flutes over sweet strings. The rest of the music has an anthemic sensibility and hints of Debussy in places, played with gusto by American Modern Ensemble.

The use of the space is marvelous. The natural reverb in the elegantly restored synagogue enhances the sonics, while the placement of singers everywhere, on the balconies and throughout the audience, is nothing short of psychedelic and underscores Gordon’s clever use of counterpoint. The performance repeats tonight, March 22 at 7:30 PM and on the anniversary of the fire, this Sunday, March 25 at 1 and 6 PM.

The New York Philharmonic’s Kaleidoscope Ensemble Puts Fun, Relevance and Respect in Music Education for Kids

Did you know that if you’re a New York City school student, you can get the New York Philharmonic to visit your class? If you think your school, or your child’s school would be a good contact, get in touch with the Philharmonic’s education department. The orchestra has a terrific teaching ensemble, Kaleidoscope, which makes the rounds of schools throughout the five boroughs.

“Kaleidoscope’s repertoire is always shifting to reflect new and relevant themes. It’s a wonderful point of entry into the very colorful and variegated sound world of the orchestra,” the Philharmonic’s Director of Education Production, Amy Leffert explained to the audience at the group’s“info-concert” Monday night at Lincoln Center’s dynamically curated atrium space. Then the ensemble – flutist Julietta Curenton, clarinetist Katie Curran, french horn player Laura Weiner, trombonist Steven Dunn and pianist Jihea Hong-Park – validated that description.

This was kickoff night, more or less, for the group’s current program on tour in city schools over the next several weeks, designed to dovetail thematically with issues students are exploring. This particular theme is the Harlem Renaissance and how it relates to the present. The program employs colorful new arrangements of classic Ellington and Gershwin works as well as a stark William Grant Still arrangement of the spiritual Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, and a more recent, picturesque piece by Valerie Coleman. Along the way, the musicians drove home how fearlessly multidisciplinary the Harlem Renaissance artists were, and how that sense of community mirrors  so many artistic movements both historically and in the present.

What was most enjoyable about this experience – other than the music, which was played with the passion and dynamism you would expect from America’s flagship orchestra – was that it’s not condescending or patronizing like so much “music appreciation” coursework. Just like jazz, the five musicians worked from a script to engage the audience, but with plenty of room for lively, conversational interplay. The adults outnumbered the kids at this show, but everyone seemed to be having a ton of fun singing along in counterpoint, working variations on the blues scale and even scatting some jazz. 

There were two big takeaways, one obvious and the other implied. First and foremost, the Philharmonic’s education outreach is all about empowerment. Curran emphasized that under ideal circumstances, she’d be more than content if a student composer was able to hear a Dvorak piece and then prefer his or her own work instead. And without ever letting the words “third stream” slip into the discussion, the quintet let the music validate the paradigm shifts that take place when two traditions as vast as African-American jazz and western classical cross-pollinate.

The highlight of the night was Imani Winds flutist and co-founder Valerie Coleman’s In Time of Silver Rain, from her colorfully pointillistic, lilting suite Portraits of Langston for flute, clarinet and piano. The group closed with Ellington’s Echoes of Harlem, Dunn’s moody, darkly foggy trombone lines front and center.

And even if a visit from the Philharmonic doesn’t fit your school’s schedule, there are tons of resources for teachers, especially geared toward grades 3-5, at the orchestra’s education page. 

A Wild, Astonishing Show in an Uptown Crypt by Lara St. John and Matt Herskowitz

By the time Lara St. John and Matt Herskowitz had finished their first number – an unpredictably serpentine Macedonian cocek dance arranged by Milica Paranosic – the violinist had already broken a sweat and was out of breath. That St. John and her pianist bandmate could maintain the kind of feral intensity they’d begun with, throughout a concert that lasted almost two hours in a stone-lined Harlem church crypt, was astounding to witness: a feast of raw adrenaline and sizzling chops.

There are probably half a dozen other violinists in the world who can play as fast and furious as St. John, but it’s hard to imagine anyone with more passion. A story from her early years as a seventeen-year-old Canadian girl studying in Moscow, right before the fall of the Soviet Union, spoke for itself. Determined to hear Armenian music in an indigenous setting, she and a couple of friends made the nonstop 36-hour drive through a series of checkpoints. “I’m Estonian,” she she told the guards: the ruse worked.

Although she’s made a career of playing classical music with many famous ensembles, her favorite repertoire comes from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. This program drew mostly from the duo’s 2015 album, sardonically titled Shiksa, new arrangements of music from across the Jewish diaspora. The night’s most adrenalizing moment might have been St. John’s searing downward cascade in John Kameel Farah’s arrangement of the Lebanese lullaby Ah Ya Zayn, from aching tenderness to a sandstorm whirl. That song wasn’t about to put anybody to sleep!

Or it might have been Herskowitz’s endless series of icepick chords in Ca La Breaza, a Romanian cimbalom tune set to a duo arrangement by Michael Atkinson. Herskowitz is the rare pianist who can keep up with St. John’s pyrotechnics, and seemed only a little less winded after the show was over. But he had a bench to sit on – St. John played the entire concert in a red velvet dress and heels, standing and swaying on a 19th century cobblestone floor.

Together the two spiraled and swirled from Armenia – Serouj Kradjian’s version of the bittersweet, gorgeously folk tune Sari Siroun Yar – to Herskowitz’s murky, suspenseful, dauntingly polyrhythmic and utterly psychedelic rearrangement of Hava Nagila, all the way into a bracingly conversational free jazz interlude. They also ripped through the klezmer classic Naftule Shpilt Far Dem Reben, a Martin Kennedy mashup of the Hungarian czardash and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody, and an elegant Kreisler waltz as the icing on the cake.

These Crypt Sessions, as they’re called, have a devoted following and sell out very quickly. Email subscribers get first dibs, and invariably scoop up the tickets. So it’s no surprise that next month’s concert, featuring countertenor John Holiday singing Italian Baroque arias, French chansons and a song cycle by African-American composer Margaret Bonds, is already sold out. But there is a waitlist, you can subscribe to the email list anytime, and the latest news is that the series will be adding dates in another crypt in Green-Wood Cemetery in the near future.

For anyone who might be intimidated by the ticket price – these shows aren’t cheap – there’s also abundant food and wine beforehand. This time it was delicious, subtly spiced, puffy Syrian-style spinach pies and vino from both Italy and France, a pairing that matched the music perfectly. Although to be truthful, barolo and spinach pies go with just about everything musical or otherwise.

Haunting Lebanese Pianist Tarek Yamani Revisits a Classic New York Concert at Lincoln Center This Friday Night

Suppose you could see the guy who played on the best live bill of 2014 – for free. Would you go? You have that option when Lebanese-born pianist Tarek Yamani plays this Friday, March 23 at 7:30 PM at the atrium space at Lincoln Center on Broadway just south of 63rd St.

Yamani opened a marathon evening of music from across the Middle East at Alwan for the Arts in January of 2014, officially called Maqamfest, known informally as the Alwan-a-thon. Here’s the report originally published here the following day.

“…Yamani kicked off the night with a richly eclectic mix of brooding Middle Eastern themes and blues-infused bop. While he didn’t deliberately seem to be working any kind of overtone series with the piano – it can be done, especially if you ride the pedal – he proved to be a magician with his chromatics and disquieting passing tones. Bassist Petros Klampanis supplied an elegant, terse, slowly strolling low end while drummer Colin Stranahan nimbly negotiated Yamani’s sometimes subtle, sometimes jarring rhythmic shifts. The trio wove a tapestry of gorgeous chromatic glimmer through a couple of romping postbop numbers to a haunting, starkly direct piano arrangement of a theme by Said Darwish, considered to be the father of modern Middle Eastern classical music. The trickiest number in their set was the title track to Yamani’s album Ashur (the Assyrian god of death). Stranahan got the dubious assignment of carrying its cruelly challenging, almost peevish syncopation, but he ran with it and nailed it.”

Yamani has done a lot since then, notably his 2017 Peninsular album, whose influences span from Cuba to Oman.  You can bet this blog will be in the house for the Friday, show which could rank among 2018’s best as well. And it’s free – you just have to get there a little early to get a seat.

A Thunderous, Sold-Out Party With Ageless Latin Jazz Piano Icon Eddie Palmieri at Lincoln Center

Party long enough and you get really, really good at it. Still, it’s amazing how fresh and vigorous Eddie Palmieri still is at age eighty. And much as he’s generous with solos, he didn’t let the band carry his show last evening at Lincoln Center, The atrium space was at absolute capacity for a crowd that was on the young side. Lincoln Center’s Viviana Benitez, who met the legendary latin jazz pianist during a sold-out run at the now-shuttered Subrosa, convinced him to come do a show for “The people, the music, the culture that we embrace.” And she got him. “As you can see it’s a very popular evening,” she said, working hard on trying to hold back a grin. Epic win in the booking department, epic fail at hiding raw bliss. Which mirrored how everybody in the packed house – as packed as this space has ever been, at least in the last five years – seemed to be feeling

Nobody in the world can make a simple two-chord vamp more interesting than Palmieri does. Obviously, there was a whole lot more to the show than that. The band didn’t even hit a salsa-clap rhythm until the bandleader himself lit into that familiar hip-grabbing syncopation about ten minutes into the show. The horns – trumpeter Jonathan Powell and tenor sax player Louis Fouché – would go out on a limb for what became longer and longer turns, then would converge tantalizingly, always with a new harmony that invariably took the music in a different and occasionally far darker direction.

Case in point: the closing number in the first set. Palmieri vocalizes off-mic while he plays, and that unmistakeable gruff voice wafted into the mix louder than ever as he played stabbing variations on a classic Cuban minor-key riff against the timbales. But instead of turning up the heat for the sake of the dancers, the band kept it murky, dropping to a ghostly, spare conga solo that finally picked up, Luques Curtis’ bass hinting at a psychedelic soul interlude before backing out. The horns diverged and then reconfigured, then hung back for Palmieri and the congas to channel some more black magic, deep ancient Africa via Cuba and then Spanish Harlem in the 70s.

Likewise, on the number before that, the bandleader went gritty with edgy close harmonies, counterrhythms and and a little extra growl. Powell took it to redline and stayed there, but by the end of the song, Palmieri was hitting on an unexpected minor chord, taking it out with a slightly more low-key, ominously boomy, shamanic semi-calm. There were many other interludes, none of them ever predictable, where Palmieri would shift the music into straight-ahead postbop jazz, bristling with polyrhythms, punchy dancing bass and biting chromatics.

Palmieri didn’t talk to the crowd much, dedicating a shapeshifting, hard-hitting Tito Puente number to a pal from his wayback days at the old Palladium Ballroom at 53rd and Broadway – less than ten blocks south of the site of this show.  He saluted one of his mentors, Thelonious Monk with the first tune of the second set and drove that point home with a nifty, uneasy intro before making bouncy rhumba jazz out of it with some artfully placed, thundering thumps from the percussion – Xavier Rivera on congas and Camilo Molina on timbales – and then the bass during a fat solo midway through. Then Palmieri faked out the crowd, careening back and forth between crushing, shifting lefthand rhythms, tumbling swing and Monk.

A stormy conga break echoed by Curtis’ monsoon chords gave way to a slinky lowrider theme that Palmieri never let get too hypnotic. They closed with a rapturously dynamic, singalong take of the mighty, defiant minor-key anthem La Libertad, Curtis spiraling and counterpunching between the woodblock and the timbales, the congas channeling a long series of rhythmic conspiracies. A detour into Palmieri’s classic, fearlessly populist latin soul hit Harlem River Drive was inevitable at that point. There was less dancing than usual – everybody seemed to want to get an album full of pix

The next salsa dance party in Lincoln Center’s mostly-monthly Vaya 63 latin music series at the atrium space on Broadway south of 63rd St. is by superstar oldschool Fania-era salsa percussionist Eddie Montalvo and his band on April 20 at 7:30 PM. If tonight’s show was any indication, you REALLY have to get there early to get a seat.

A Clinic in Tunesmithing and Improvisation From This Era’s Greatest Jazz Guitarist

Albums that combine state-of-the-art tunesmithing with similarly rapturous improvisation are rare. That’s what Bill Frisell does on his latest release, Music IS, a solo recording streaming at Spotify. His previous album, Small Town, was a similarly spare, low-key set, recorded live at the Village Vanguard with bassist Thomas Morgan. This one’s even more intimate, a master class from this era’s greatest jazz guitarist. Or maybe, considering that Frisell has never limited himself to jazz, it’s time to consider him as this era’s greatest guitarist, period. Americana has been an important part of his catalog for decades, but on this album it really comes to the foreground. He’s in the midst of a long stand at the Vanguard this month, with sets at 8:30 and 11. Today and tomorrow, he leads a trio with Morgan and the great Rudy Royston on drums. Then on the 20th, the three add add violist Eyvind Kang.

At a time where every six-string player with fast fingers and absolutely nothing to say seems to be going into jazz, Frisell stands out even more. He can play lickety-split when he wants, but throughout his career, his songs tend to be on the slow side. This album is a clinic in how he does it, just guitars and Frisell’s trustly loop pedal.

The songs are a mix of new ones and stripped-down versions of older material. The standout among the album’s sixteen tracks is Change in the Air, a somber, plaintive, Britfolk-tinged pavane, Frisell methodically building lingering rainy-day ambience around a simple one-five bass figure. Like most of the other tracks, it’s over in less than three minutes.

Go Happy Lucky comes across as a minimalist collage based on the old blues standard Since I Met You Baby. In Line, which could be an electrified John Fahey tune, begins with a lusciously chiming vintage soul progression, then Frisell deconstructs it using every wryly oscillating, floating or echoing patch in his pedal: is that a twelve-string effect, or the real thing? Likewise, is that an acoustic that Frisell’s playing on the subdued, spare oldtime folk-style ballads The Pioneers, or just his Tele through a pedal?

Sometimes Frisell’s loops are very brief; other times he’ll run a whole verse or chorus. Kentucky Derby has one of the longer ones, a very funny juxtaposition of distorted roar and flitting upper-register accents. He expands very subtly on a stately oldtime folk theme in Made to Shine, then artfully makes a forlorn, abandoned, Lynchian ballad out of a purist Jim Hall-like tune in Miss You.

Another ballad, Monica Jane is more spare and lingering, Frisell turning up the tremolo and spicing it with the occasional tritone or chromatic riff for distant menace in a Steve Ulrich vein. There’s also a punchline, a long one.

In Pretty Stars, Frisell stashes a simple, twinkling two-note riff in the pedal, then makes soulful country gospel out of it – lots of history and a little mystery at the end. Rambler follows the same formula, in this case a surreal wah-wah figure that completely changes the mood from pensive to bemused, compared to the alternate take included as a bonus track at the end of the album.

Frisell salutes iconic bassist Ron Carter with a stark, saturnine theme, part 19th century spiritual, part Wayfaring Stranger, with a little Wes Montgomery at the end. The album’s most anthemic track is Thankful: methodically crescendoing with burning, distorted, bluesy leads. it’s the closest to rocking the hell out that Frisell does here. Although the simmering miniature Think About It is pretty loud too.

The album’s most wintry number is What Do You Want, again bringing to mind Steve Ulrich and Big Lazy in pensive mode. A blues with uneasy ornamentation, Winslow Homer has a similarly surreal cinematic feel. All this is another notch on the belt for a guy who might have made more good albums than anybody else over the past thirty-five years.

Aakash Mittal at Nationa Sawdust: A Major Moment in New York Jazz This Year

Alto saxophonist Aakash Mittal’s sold-out show with his Awaz Trio at National Sawdust on the 11th of this month was as mysterious as it was mischievous – and delivered an unmistakeable message that this guy’s time has come. The obvious comparison is Rudresh Mahanthappa, another reedman who draws deeply on classic Indian melodies and modes. But Mittal doesn’t typically go for the jugular like Mahanthappa does: a more apt comparison would be visionary Iraqi-American trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, who joined Mittal onstage for the second half of the program alongside guitarist Miles Okazaki and percussionist Rajna Swaminathan, who played both the boomy mridangam as well as a small, tabla-like hand drum.

Mittal has been simmering just under the radar in New York for awhile but has been increasingly in demand over the past year, playing with both both ElSaffar’s large ensemble and Pulitzer-winning singer/composer Du Yun, who gave him a rave review for an onstage introduction. The trio of Mittal, Okazaii and Swaminathan opened with a seven-part suite of night raga themes reinvented as jazz. Mittal explained that he’d written it during his a year in Kolkata studying traditional Indian sounds, and that his purpose was to redefine the concept of a nocturne to encompass both mystery and mirth. One suspects he had an awfully good time there.

He didn’t waste any time unleashing his daunting extended technique with some uneasy riffs punctuated by otherworldly overtones and microtones, yet throughout the rest of the night he held those devices in store for where he really needed them. Likewise, he chose his moments for puckish accents and sardonic chirps that got the crowd laughing out loud; as the show went on, Okazaki and Swaminathan got in on the act as well. Which made for apt comic relief amidst the lustrous, glimmering and often sparsely plaintive phrasing that pervaded the rest of the suite and the evening as a whole.

Mittal peppered the dreamlike state with lively, often circling, edgily chromatic phrases: he likes lights in the night, but he knows the dark side of the bright lights just as well. Okazaki ranged from spare, emphatic accents, often in tandem with Swaminathan, to expansive, lingering chords, to long interludes where his spiky phrasing evoked a sarod. The evening’s biggest crescendo fell to Swaminathan, and she welcomed a chance to bring some thunder to the gathering storm.

ElSaffar joined the group for the final numbers, opening a brand-new suite – which Mittal had just finished a couple days before, based on a poems by his sister Meera Mittal – with a mesmerizing series of long tones where time practically stood still. From there he and Mittal developed an increasingly animated conversation, through alternately lush and kinetic segments underscoring the influence that the trumpeter has had on the bandleader: it was a perfect match of soloists and theme. The group closed with what Mittal offhandedly called a jam, but it quickly became much more than that, a jauntily voiced mini-raga of its own laced with both utter seriousness and unleashed good humor. Both Mittal and ElSaffar’s music is full of gravitas and sometimes an almost throttle-like focus, but each composer also has a great sense of humor, and that really came to the forefront here.

This was the final show in this spring’s series of concerts at National Sawdust programmed by Du Yun, focusing on composers of Asian heritage who may be further under the radar than they deserve to be. The next jazz show at National Sawdust – or one that at least skirts the idiom with a similar outside-the-box sensibility – is by thereminist Pamelia Stickney with Danny Tunick on vibraphone and marimba and Stuart Popejoy on keyboards on March 28 at 7 PM; advance tix are $25 and highly recommended.

The Claudia Quintet Make a Triumphant NYC Return Uptown

What’s the likelihood that a band would be better now than they were over two decades ago? The Claudia Quintet defy those odds. They didn’t invent pastoral jazz, but pretty much every rainy-sky jazz group with an accordion (who don’t play Romany guitar swing, anyway) owe a debt to drummer John Hollenbeck’s long-running ensemble. It’s been awhile since they’ve played a New York gig, let alone one at a prestige venue like the Miller Theatre, where they’ll be on March 24 at 8. Tix are as affordable as $20.

On one hand, it’s a good bet that pretty much everybody who’s a fan of the band already has their most recent album, Super Petite, streaming at Cuneiform Records. If the group are new to you, they’re a vehicle for Hollenbeck’s more concise compositions – he saves the most lavish ones for his equally tuneful and relevant Large Ensemble. This 2016 release is as good a place to start as any to get to know the band: the tunes are slightly more condensed than usual, with plenty of cinematic flair and wry humor. Beyond this one, the band’s essential album is September, ironically their most improvisational release, a brooding examination of post-9/11 shock and horror that would have been a lock for best album of 2013 had Darcy James Argue not decided to release Brooklyn Babylon that same year.

Super Petite opens with Nightbreak, an echoey nocturne fueled by Matt Moran’s summer-evening vibraphone, lingering in stereo over the bandleader’s muted, altered shuffle as Chris Speed’s clarinet and Red Wierenga’s accordion waft amid the starry ambience. There’s a Charlie Parker solo hidden deep in this night sky.

Hollenbeck’s all businesslike while Wierenga runs a wary, pulsing loop and Speed sniffs around throughout JFK Beagle, the first half of a diptych inspired by airport drug-sniffing dogs. The second, Newark Beagle begins much more carefree but then Moran takes it into the shadows: cheesy Jersey airports are where the really sketchy characters can be found. There’s more similarly purposeful, perambulating portraiture and a memorably jaunty Speed clarinet solo a bit later on in If You Seek a Fox.

Bassist Drew Gress dances through the acidically loopy, hooky ambience in A-List as the bandleader drives it forcefully: being a meme is obviously hard work. Wierenga’s swoops and dives over Moran’s high-beam gleam is one of the album’s high points. Speed takes careening flight in Philly, a wry shout-out to Philly Joe Jones and how far out a famous shuffle riff of his can be taken.

High harmonies from Wierenga and Moran take centerstage and eventually hit a very funny ending in the brisk but idyllic Peterborough, home to the MacDowell Colony, where Hollenbeck wrote it. Rose Colored Rhythm takes its inspiration from Senegalese drummer/composer Doudou N’Diaye Rose, an epic journey through haze to insistent minimalism, cartoonish riffage and wry syncopation all around.

Pure Poem, which draws on knotty numerical sequences from the work of Japanese poet Shigeru Matsui, has hints of bhangra jabbing through Hollenbeck’s boisterous pointillisms. The album concludes with Mangold, a shout to his favorite Austrian vegetarian restaurant (such things exist – there’s hope for the world!). With sax and vibraphone joining for a belltone attack, it’s unexpectedly moody. Heartwarming to see a band who’ve been around for as long as these guys still as fresh and indomitable as ever.