by Nate Chinen
“Burbuling Brook Crossing Rocky Ground”
Henry Threadgill, an alto saxophonist and flutist, and Myra Melford, who plays piano and harmonium, both specialize in a music of passing frictions and artful striations. As composers, they use texture as a destabilizing agent: the center often holds, but not without a bit of resistance. Improvisation flows through their efforts like a stream, widening or constricting to suit the features of an uneven terrain.
Mr. Threadgill and Ms. Melford proved the soundness of these strategies on Thursday night in a powerfully engrossing double bill at Roulette. Each presided over an unusual and graceful ensemble, and each presented new works packed with vivid energies. The program was presented by Interpretations, the new-music concert series celebrating its 20th season; it packed Roulette’s gallerylike performance space beyond capacity.
Mr. Threadgill, 64, has ages of experience in the jazz avant-garde, with a career stretching to the origins of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. His half of the concert featured Zooid, a working group with Liberty Ellman on guitar, Stomu Takeishi on acoustic bass guitar, Jose Davila on tuba and Elliot Humberto Kavee on drums.
The ensemble simultaneously inhabits two extremes of pitch, with its murky bass clef offsetting a piquant high register. And that spirit of contrast applies equally to rhythm. The opener, “Extremely Sweet William,” interposed its abstract acoustic funk with open-form exploration.
A second piece began with Mr. Threadgill’s expressive alto against shimmering cymbals, at a stately pace. Then came a lurching group improvisation, and memorable solo statements by Mr. Davila (blustery) and Mr. Ellman (breezy).
“Fate Cues,” the closer, was a clangorous work commissioned by the Talujon Percussion Quartet, which joined Zooid in performing it. All those woodblocks, cowbells and gongs brought an even stronger sense of multiplicity to Mr. Threadgill’s music, though to some extent it came at the price of clarity.
“I’ve been trying to find a home for it for about a year now,” Mr. Threadgill said of the piece. “Interpretations said they would take us off the streets — and put us together with Myra, which was a perfect combination.”
Ms. Melford illustrated that point herself. At 51, she hails from the generation after Mr. Threadgill’s; she has apprenticed with him, metabolizing his ideas. Stringing together sections of an arresting new suite called “Happy Whistlings,” she enlisted Matana Roberts on alto saxophone, Mary Halvorson on guitar and Harris Eisenstadt on drums. They all played with erudition and drive, in various formations, with parts drifting in and out like visitors to a room.
Ultimately the quartet, variously cagey, fitful, euphonious and spindly, made restlessness feel like a secret discipline. At one point Ms. Melford whispered furtive passages of verse, barely audible and mostly incomprehensible. Apparently that was a secret too.