The Bryant Park Accordion Festival: Like a Free, Weekly Midtown Golden Fest

The Bryant Park accordion festival is like a free Midtown version of Golden Fest – except without the food. It could also be said that Golden Fest is a two-night, Brooklyn version of the Bryant Park festival, without the blankets and the lawn chairs. Either way, each is a bucket-list experience for New Yorkers. You’ll have to wait til next January 12-13 for Golden Fest 2019, but starting at 5:30 PM every Wednesday through Sept 12, you can see pretty much every global style of accordion music in Bryant Park. The grand finale is on Friday the 14th starting a half hour earlier.

While Golden Fest is a marathon feast that lasts into the wee hours, you can pop into Bryant Park after work and hang out for however long you want. Five different performers play short sets starting on the half hour at five different stations throughout the park until 7:30. Golden Fest is this country’s big celebration of music from across the Balkans and to some extent, the Middle East. While styles from those parts of the world are also part of the Bryant Park festival, so far there’s been a lot of music from south of the border.

It was fun to stop in by a couple of weeks ago to catch a set by Erica Mancini, who pretty much embodies what the festival is all about, considering how vast her stylistic range is. Last year she did blues and swing; her show last week was a slinky mix of cumbia, tango and a bolero. Playing both instrumentals and sad ballads and and singing in nuanced, plaintively modulated Spanish, she was backed by a sensationally good mandolinist who ran through a pedalboard for icy, watery textures, trippy delays and gritty noise loops.It was as if Chicha Libre got back together…with an even better singer out front.

Last week’s show was on the hottest day of the year. That Rachelle Garniez managed to get through four sets without sitting down, with that big box strapped to her back, was impressive enough. That she sang as soaringly and powerfully as she ever has, in that heat, was even more so. She’s probably the best songwriter of the past twenty years, bar none – and that’s not meant as a dis to Steve Wynn, or Hannah Fairchild, or Aimee Mann. Methodically and even energetically, Garniez made her way through Tourmaline, a wistful yet forcefully determined individualist’s waltz, then worked her way up from a suspenseful, atmospheric intro into the strutting, coy hokum blues innuendos of Medicine Man.

She flipped the script on Aesop by reimagining the tale of the ant and the grasshopper in a fairer world where a bon vivant shouldn’t have to choose antlike drudgery to survive. She also treated the crowd on the terrace on the Sixth Avenue side to a deadpan verse or two of the Stones’ Paint It Black – which in its own surreal way was just as twistedly fun as the Avengers’ cover – and also the lilting, pre-apocalyptic tropicalia of Silly Me, from her 2000 album Crazy Blood.

And playing button accordion, fiery Venezuelan Harold Rodriguez really worked up a sweat, backed by supple bass and percussion in a literally volcanic set of rapidfire cumbias, a merengue tune and a handful of vallenato standards that got the expat crew singing along. He’s at Barbes with the group on Sept 17 at 9:30 PM

This week’s installment of the festival, on Sept 5 starting at 5:30 PM features singer Eva Salina and accordionist Peter Stan playing haunting Romany ballads,  Cordeone doing Portuguese fado laments, bandoneonist Laura Vilche playing tango, and Romany swing accordionist Albert Behar, among many others.

A Stormy, Epically Relevant Jazz Standard Show by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society

In their late set last night at the Jazz Standard, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society threw caution to the wind with a stormy, careeningly dynamic career retrospective of sorts. Which isn’t what you might expect from the conductor’s intricate, tightly clustering compositions. But this era’s most thrilling, relevant large jazz ensemble’s approach perfectly fit his material’s relentless angst, white-knuckle suspense and cynically cinematic, Shostakovian portraiture.

Argue’s albums are meticulously orchestrated and produced – which is not to imply that they suffer from the digital sterility of so many big band albums these days. Even so, this show was especially fresh and full of surprises. The group opened somewhat counterintuitively with an older tune, Flux in a Box – Argue explained that he took the title of the subtly polyrhythmic, Jim McNeely-like number, with its cell-like mini-spirals and bursts, from a vast, sarcastic fictitious filmography in a David Foster Wallace novel. Alto saxophonist Alexa Tarentino chose her moments carefully for variations on staggered, fragmented phrases, pianist Adam Birnbaum offering comfortably lyrical contrast.

Then they immediately launched into the ferocious, fearlessly political material Argue has made a name for himself with in recent years. First was a series of tunes from his withering critique of gentrification, Brooklyn Babylon, kicking off with Matt Clohesy’s mighty bass chords, Sebastian Noelle’s resonant guitar astringencies, a vividly nightmarish portrait of grand construction schemes run horribly amok. Seemingly hell-bent on getting to the end, they leapt through tense pairings of instruments among the band’s eighteen members to a harried take of Coney Island, which was strangely more enigmatic here than the album’s horror-stricken, plaintive coda.

Three pieces from the group’s latest conspiracy and conspiracy theory-themed album, Real Enemies were next on the bill. Amped up to a level remarkable at this sonically pristine spot, The Enemy Within came across as a mashup of the Theme from Shaft and the Taxi Driver theme as done by an epic version of John Zorn’s Spy Vs. Spy, maybe. Dark Alliance had wry woozy P-Funk textures grounded by relentless Bernard Herrman-esque glimmer and ghostly flickers, alto saxophonist Dave Pietro resisting any possible urge to find any kind of resolution in his exquisitely troubled, modal solo. A duel with trombonist Ryan Keberle followed – not waterboarder and waterboardee, but allusively so.

The last of the triptych was the mighty, swaying Trust No One, Carl Maraghi’s serpentine baritone sax solo giving way to a sudden dip to creepy knock-knock riffs, deep-space pointillisms from Birnbaum and Noelle jumpstarting a flitting poltergeist choir from the saxes. They closed with Transit and its fiery, cloudbursting drama. Argue explained that he’d written it on a Fung Wah bus enroute from Boston to Chinatown – no wonder it’s so scary! In that context, the constant dodges between phrases rushing by, not to mention the irresistibly fun trick ending, made perfect sense. Trumpeter Jason Palmer’s solo turned out to be more of an expert series of Route 495 twists and turns than the launching pad for pyrotechnics that it usually is in concert. The takeaway: a frequently riveting performance by a crew also including but not limited to multi-reedman Sam Sadigursky, trumpeters Seneca Black and Nadje Noordhuis; trombonists Jacob Garchik, Mike Fahie and Jennifer Wharton and drummer Jon Wikan.

A Mesmerizing Start to the Final Installment of This Year’s Charlie Parker Festival

The final night of this year’s Charlie Parker Festival this past weekend was front-loaded. Young lions and then a veteran lioness set the bar impossibly high for whatever followed. By five in the evening, the usual wall-to-wall mob that has come out for the festival’s original flagship space, Tompkins Square Park, hadn’t materialized. Maybe it was the stormclouds overhead. Maybe, more ominously, the shrinking turnout reflects how many of the longtime East Village residents who supported this festival year after year have been driven out by gentrifiers. As we all know, gentrifiers have no interest in the arts: there’s infinitely more perceived immortality in taking a selfie in front of a hundred dollar brunch spread than while watching some guy blowing weird notes on a horn at a show which costs nothing to attend.

So an aging bunch of East Village holdovers (that’s what they call us), kids and tourists got to revel quietly in the trio of trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, tenor saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins and vibraphonist Joel Ross, teamed up with drummer Craig Weinrib, conguero Roman Diaz and a slinky bassist throughout a set that shifted artfully from rapturous, misty atmospherics, to tantalizingly allusive Afro-Cuban grooves punctuated by darkly masterful solos. O’Farrill set the tone, leading a hazy, distantly disconcerted tone poem to open the show, then finally brought it back at the end of their roughly 45 minutes onstage. In between, they reinvented hauntingly elegaic Coltrane as AACM cloudscape, spiced with wickedly incisive Arabic-tinged modal horn work, Then they took a jaunting, biting clave theme and made a lattice of disorienting polyrhythms out of it. The bassist managed to hold the center, pedaling his riffs while Weinrib and Diaz made their meticulous rhythmic negotiation look effortless. This really is the future of jazz, and it’s in good hands with these relatively young, restlessly hungry cats.

Which is not to say that ageless septuagenarian Amina Claudine Myers isn’t still pushing the envelope. What a trip it was to watch open her se by swinging her way through gutbucket Jimmy Smith B3 organ grease, leading a trio with Jerome Harris on guitar and Reggie Nicholson on drums. Then she took the party into the tectonically shifting ambience she’s best known for, building a storm on the horizon with peaks in between for stark, magisterial 19th century gospel and practically the complete Chopin C Minor Prelude. Rather than twisting the harmonies to suit the rest of the material, she played it exactly as written, letting its anguished series of chords linger. “Have mercy,” she sang over and over again throughout the set’s last number, as much a command as an entreaty.

There were a couple of other acts on the bill afterward, but pianist Orrin Evans’ originals are a thousand times more interesting than the material he was scheduled to run through as a replacement at this money gig. O’Farrill is at the Jazz Gallery on Sept 29 at 7 PM on day two of Futurefest there, dueling it out with guitarist Gabe Schnider, followed by obscure Japanese jazz unit Secret Mall and then at 10 by vibraphonist Sasha Berliner leading a quartet. Cover is $25.

An Incendiary Concert at a Legendary Studio Immortalized on the BC 35 Album

Martin Bisi is a legend of the New York underground  – and he’s hardly a stranger in many other worlds as well. As a young engineer in 1983, he vaulted to prominence by winning a Grammy for his work on Herbie Hancock’s hit Rockit, which would go on to be sampled by thousands of hip-hop acts over the decades. The vast list of acts Bisi has worked with at his legendary Gowanus digs BC Studios runs from Sonic Youth  to John Zorn to the Dresden Dolls. 

His new album BC 35 – streaming at Bandcamp – was recorded in front of a live audience there over the course of a marathon weekend in January of 2016, a historic event very enthusiastically reviewed here. True to form, Bisi also recorded it and played with many of the groups on the bill, in celebration of the studio’s 35th anniversary. Much as he’s as distinctive and darkly erudite a guitarist as he is a producer, he’s somewhere in the mix here on three tracks: characteristically, he isn’t being ostentatious. His latest gig is at El Cortez on Sept 1 at around 8 on a killer triplebill, in between the perennially sick, twisted noiserock of the Sediment Club and the headliners, no wave sax legends James Chance & the Contortions. Cover is $20.

The order of the tracks leaps back and forth between the Saturday and Sunday sessions. The album’s most notable cut is Details of the Madness, the first recording and live performance by 80s noiserock legends Live Skull (who call themselves New Old Skull here) since 1998. guitarist Mark C, bassist Marnie Greenholz Jaffe and drummer Rich Hutchins pick up like they never left off, enigmatically catchy, icy guitar multitracks over a relentless fuzztone swing that slows with an ominous nod to Joy Division.

Some of these tracks are improvisations, including the album’s opening number, Nowhere Near the Rainbow. Original Sonic Youth drummer Bob Bert gives Parlor Walls guitarist Alyse Lamb, Skeleton Boy from Woman and Lubricated Goat’s Stu Spasm a slinky pulse for sputters and squall punctuated by the occasional anthemic goth riff. SYNESTHESIA!  – an Alice Donut reunion, more or less – is similar but much dirtier. Denton’s Dive – with Hutchins, Skeleton Boy, Dave W, Phil Puleo and Ivan Up – is practically ten minutes of sludgecore, dissociative reverbtoned noise and swaying atrocity exhibition atmosphere.

Here’s how this blog described the Sunday session jam What a Jerk: “Algis Kisys of Swans jousted with ex-Cop Shoot Cop bassist Jack Natz and drummer Jim Coleman for a ferocious blast through a hornet’s nest of needle-pinning fuzztones and booming low-register chords.” What’s here is a judicious edit – if noiserock jams can be judiciously edited, Bisi’s definitely the man for the job. After that, Tidal Channel’s no wave synth-and-spoken-word piece Humash Wealth Management, Inc. keeps the assault going full force.

JG Thirlwell’s characteristically creepy, southwestern gothic overture Downhill features Insect Ark’s Dana Schechter on bass and violinist Laura Ortman leading a full string section. It is probably less memorable for being this blog’s owner’s most recent appearance on album, as part of the impromptu “BC Radiophonic Choir.”

The lineup on The Animals Speak Truth includes Barbez’s Dan Kaufman on guitar, Botanica’s Paul Wallfisch on organ and keys and the Dresden Dolls’ Brian Viglione on drums, maintaining the lingering lysergic menace in a vamping instrumental that picks up to a grimly tumbling, clustering pace.

Looking back to the weekend reportage again: “Susu guitarist Andrea Havis and drummer Oliver Rivera Drew (who made a tight rhythm section with baritone guitarist Diego Ferri, both of whom play in Bisi’s European touring band) backed Arrow’s soaring frontwoman Jeannie Fry through a swirl of post-MBV maelstrom sonics and wary, moodily crescendoing postpunk jangle.“ That’s His Word Against Mine, by JADO.

White Hills’ echoey End of the Line offers contrast as well as the weekend’s lone reference point to Brian Eno, BC Studios’ co-founder. Bolstered by Wallfisch and Viglione, noir singer/guitarist Ajda the Turkish Queen’s toweringly gorgeous, Lynchian waltz Take This Ride is the strongest track here. The album concludes with a noisy, hypnotically pulsing jam by Cinema Cinema plus David Lackner and Mikel Dos Santos, and more Tidal Channel assault. Warts and all, you’ll see this on the best albums of 2018 page at the end of the year, a magical piece of history. What a treat it was to be witness to most of it.

A Mighty, Moody Album and a Lincoln Center Gig by the Scott Reeves Jazz Orchestra

The rain-slicked streetcorner tableau on the album cover of the Scott Reeves Jazz Orchestra’s latest release Without a Trace – streaming at Bandcamp – Is truth in advertising. In recent years the group have taken a turn into moody, brassy latin-inspired sounds, something they excel at. They’re at Dizzy’s Club on Sept 3, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30. Cover is steep – $35 – but like most A-list large jazz ensembles not named the Maria Schneider Orchestra, you don’t get many chances to see them. This time out the lineup includes singer Carolyn Leonhart; alto saxophonists Jon Gordon and Jay Brandford; tenor saxophonists Rob Middleton and Tim Armacost; baritone saxophonist Terry Goss; trumpeters Nathan Eklund, Dave Smith, Chris Rogers, and Andy Gravish; trombonists Matt McDonald, Jason Jackson and Matt Haviland; bass trombonist Max Seigel; pianist Roberta Piket; bassist Todd Coolman and drummer Andy Watson.

They open the album with a an expansively layered, brassy cha-cha arrangement of Kurt Well’s Speak Low, a feature for Steve Wilson’s allusive, melismatic alto sax, echoed by trumpeter Chris Rogers. Watson’s stampeding drums kick off a tasty series of chromatic riffs from the brass to wind it up.

With a stunningly misty wistfulness, Leonhart gives voice to the longing and angst in Reeves’ moodily latin-inspired title track, Jim Ridl’s tightly clustering piano ceding to Armacost’s more optimistic tenor solo. Likewise, they turn toward Vegas noir in Reeves’ broodingly bouncy reinvention of All or Nothing At All, following the bandleader’s bluesy, bubbling solo up to a haggard, white-knuckle-intense crescendo.

Incandescence could be a Gil Evans tune, maintaining a grim intensity throughout Reeves’ distantly Ravel-esque portrait of starlight over the French countryside. Vibraphonist Dave Ellson moves carefully, Ridl more menacingly, Wilson’s soprano sax peeking and glissandoing with a relentless unease.

Reeves based his own vampy arrangement of Wayne Shorter’s Juju on the composer’s most recent chart for the song and beefed it up with bright banks of brass. Tenor saxophonist Rob Middleton’s solo draws closely on Shorter’s own modally-charged work on the original.

Reeves then looks to Alberto Ginastera’s Piano Sonata No. 1 for the central hook for the album’s most epic track, Shape Shifter, with gritty close harmonies, Ridl’s Arabic-tinged piano and Reeves’ alto flugelhorn solo vividly bringing to mind the most cinematic side of early 60s Gil Evans – although a relatively free interlude with Ridl leading the randomness is a detour the song really doesn’t need. The brightly gusty closing cut, Something for Thad is a Thad Jones shout-out. Many flavors and lots to savor here.

Monty Alexander Brings Jamdown Jazz Full Circle at the Charlie Parker Festival

Yesterday evening at the uptown Saturday night edition of this year’s Charlie Parker Festival, Monty Alexander explained that his most recent free outdoor concert here had been in Central Park. He didn’t bother to mention that his mid-90s performance there with guitarist Ernie Ranglin was one of the landmark musical events in this city over the past 25 years.

The pianist and leader of the Harlem-Kingston Express told the crowd that when he’d been booked for yesterday’s show, he’d asked the festival organizers where he’d be playing. When he found out that it would be Marcus Garvey Park, his response was, “Marcus Garvey Park? But Marcus Garvey is Jamaican!”

The exuberant reggae-jazz icon added that he hoped the park’s name wouldn’t be changed back to what it used to be (it was still Mount Morris Park back in 1967 when Alexander led a completely different band several blocks west at Minton’s).

Shifting into serious mode, he and the group launched into an amped-up version of the Burning Spear classic Marcus Garvey. Joshua Thomas, the group’s electric bassist sang it in a strong, soulful tenor, then in a split second the group segued into So What and took the tune doublespeed.  All this dovetailed with the circumstances: Wynton Kelly, the pianist on Miles Davis’ original, was also Jamaican.

Until around the time of that legendary Central Park show, Alexander was regarded as a traditionalist and an expert at ballads. The collaboration with Ranglin, a fellow Jamaican icon, was a game-changer, and their reinvention of Bob Marley classics won both of them a global following far beyond the jazz world. Yet, as Alexander explained, he’s no less a jazz guy for loving reggae riddims. For Alexander, just like Ellington, there are two kinds of music.

This band is very much the first kind. There are two drummers, two basses and two keyboards including Alexander. Most of the time the Jamaican guys play the reggae material and the Americans do the swing stuff, but there’s plenty of overlap, and when both drummers and both bassists are going strong the sound can be epic.

One of the evening’s most anthemic, incisive numbers sounded like a version of the Abyssinians’s Satta Massagana: as with much of the other material, Alexander made a doublespeed swing blues out of it, then returned back to the original theme to wind it down. A little later, they used the opening riff from Marley’s Could You Be Loved to stir up a similar stew. 

The most riveting solo of the night was from bassist Hassan Shakur, juxtaposing crushing chords and ghostly harmonics with a bluesy drive way up the fingerboard. Drummer Carl Radle played thunderous vaudeville against the beat, all but drowning the rest of the crew during his one irresistibly fun solo moment. Similarly, saxophonist Wayne Escoffery went for adrenaline, especially during the Coltrane solo in So What; the band’s trombonist was a bluesy, more low key foil.

Meanwhile, the electronic keyboardist played mostly clickety-clack clavinova behind Alexander’s spacious chords and regal blues phrases, adding organ on the biggest hit with the crowd, No Woman No Cry. They closed with a coy calypso medley that veered into Hava Nagila for a few bars, Alexander spiraling around on his melodica.

This was a tantalizingly short set, especially for these guys, which may portend what’s in store this afternoon at Tompkins Square Park where the festival began in 1993. Festivities start at 3 with a trio of young guns: trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins and vibraphonist Joel Ross. Iconic, rapturous AACM pianist/organist Amina Claudine Myers follows at 4, there’s a corporate jazz act whose new pianist is way better than the last one, then postbop sax vet Gary Bartz leading a quartet to close things out at around 6. You might want to bring a folding chair if you have one because blanket space on the lawn will be limited.

Us, Today Bring Their Catchy Postrock Grooves to the Lower East Next Weekend

Cincinnati trio Us, Today are one of those rare bands who’ve refined a sound like no other out group there. It’s easy to categorize them as postrock: the obvious comparison is Tortoise. At other times, they come across as a more minimalist take on Ensemble Et Al at their most energetic. Us, Today’s instrumentals are both purposeful and psychedelic, catchy and hypnotic. Kristin Agee plays vibraphone and keys, with Joel Griggs on guitar and and Jeff Mellott on drums. They’re playing the big room at the Rockwood at 10 PM on Sept 2.

Their latest album, Computant is streaming at Bandcamp. The opening track, No Funny Game is actually far from sinister – Agee’s tight vibraphone riffs dance gracefully over a smoothly undulating, funky groove spiced with Griggs’ gritty textures as it winds out.

Spellcaster (Dr. Spirit) begins in a similar vein but goes through some subtle rhythmic shifts. Griggs mutes his emphatic low notes for basslines and eventually goes echoing through the Van Allen Belt; Agee holds her pedal down for a woozy organ effect. Hello Viewers, a carillon-like miniature, introduces Sharin’, a trickily rhythmic, propulsive number: is that Griggs playing bass or is that fat envelope sound coming from Agee’s bass synth? 

Best Unfriends is a tasty, propulsive motorik groove with echoey dreampop riffage from Griggs. Likewise, WHAT IS TIME NOW. GOODMORNING? has a tense krautrock pulse, Griggs’ incisive riffage burning through Agee’s raindrops.

Circling, buzzy syncopated guitar riffs exchange with the twinkle of the vibraphone over flitting, woozy lows in Greetings from the Master. The album’s most colorful track is Wealthe + Fame + Love + Luck, mashing up minimalist P-Funk, indie classical, dreampop and hints of 80s goth, Griggs’ machete chord-chopping fueling the blaze over a deadpan backdrop. The trio segue into the lingering final number, Eracism and its amusing trick ending.

Some people might hear a few bars of this and confuse it with mathrock. Much as Us, Today’s music is all instrumental, with textures straight from the video game theme park, it’s much more interesting and cinematic. Isn’t it funny how music equated with mathematics so often tends to be spastic and awkward…hardly mathlike, when you think about it.

Fun fact: the band’s catalog also includes the acerbic single The Compulsion of Picture Taking. Somebody had to do that and it’s a good thing it was these guys.

An Epic, Darkly Profound New Solo Live Album and a Rare Brooklyn Gig by Iconic Pianist Satoko Fujii

Pianist Satoko Fujii’s epic new solo live album Invisible Hand – streaming at Spotify – is dark and dead serious. She improvises as purposefully and tunefully as anyone who ever lived. If historical accounts are accurate, that puts her on the level of Bach and Schubert, along with Monk, and Brubeck, and Ellington. Those comparisons are deliberate – the astonishingly prolific Fujii’s work combines brooding classical intensity with in-the-moment jazz fearlessness. Her latest project is to release an album a month this year, a promise she’s fulfilled so far. She’s making one of her increasingly rare New York appearances this Aug 29 at 8:30 PM at I-Beam, leading a trio with husband Natsuki Tamura on trumpet and Yoshi Shutto on drums. Cover is $15; be aware that she routinely sells out this venue.

The new album is the debut release on Cortez Records, a new label that’s just as impromptu as Fujii’s music can be. Teruhiko Ito, proprietor of the intimate venue Cortez in the small city of Mito, Japan, essentially launched it to release Fujii’s epic solo concert there from the winter of 2016. In the midst of a snowstorm, a crowd nevertheless came out and responded rapturously.

“Recently I have been hearing that people everywhere in the world are losing interest in music and culture, and the situation is getting worse and worse,” Fujii relates in the liner notes.. “However, around Cortez, there are no signs of that.”

Here are a few reasons why. While Fujii has made scores of albums, almost all of them are with other players. Surprisingly, while perhaps best known as an improviser, she virtually never plays a full set of solo improvisation. The first of this double-cd collection captures only the fourth time in a 25-plus year career that she’s done that.

Which is a paradox, for many reasons, not the least because her improvisation here can sound meticulously composed, while the compositions are spiked with off-the-cuff flourishes and some occasionally pretty wild displays of extended technique. Fujii opened that wintry night with a piece titled Thought, rising through frequent allusions to Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1, to an intense but judicious crescendo and an ominously quiet, chromatically bristling conclusion. From there she did some scampering and some leapfrogging, but also built a methodical thematic variation and a crashing coda

The album’s towering, thirteen-minute title cut has spare, somber, low-mid register melody and some absolutely macabre moments, set to a autoharp-like rainy-day wash of sound that Fujii resonates on the strings inside the piano. In almost sixteen minutes of Floating, she creates a mystical ambience with spare, serioso phrasing and then a muted temple bell-like melody, again played with inside the piano. It sounds practically like a koto.

Fujii’s shift toward a steady anthemic drive that’s practically a stadium rock ballad is striking – how much is she messing with the audience, and how much just with herself? Yet, she ends it with her signature gravitas. She concludes the set with Hayase, working a rather grimly percussive raga-like melody against a central tone.

The second cd opens with a somber single chord, then Fujii makes her way into the ineluctably uneasy, spacious I Know You Don’t Know, leaving her phrases and spare clusters to linger. Flickers of Charles Ives contemplation contrast with waves of Cecil Taylor agitation

Summer Storm juxtaposes cascading, neoromantically-tinged phrasing with circular, Glass-ine melody. The subtle syncopation and ever-present angst of Inori bring the Satie echoes into even closer focus, with a cell-like Reichian precision. After the tumbling bustle of Green Cab, seemingly the most improvisational piece here, Fujii closes with a gospel-infused take of Gen Himmel, the title track to her hushed, rapturous 2013 album.

Fujii is no stranger to a magnum opus. Her densely orchestrated, harrowing 2017 Fukushima suite is her darkest masterpiece to date and was ranked best album of the year here. Her 2008 double cd Minamo, a duo with violist Karla Kihlstedt, is almost as shattering. This one is close behind, another notch in the hall of fame credentials of a rugged individualist who is as consistently interesting and relevant as she is prolific.

Majestic Menace and a Free Download From an Iconic Big Band

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society rank with the Maria Schneider Orchestra as this era’s greatest big bands, even if Argue’s eighteen-piece behemoth hasn’t been around as long as hers. While his recorded catalog is understandably smaller, he has more albums than you might be aware of, including a trio of live collections. OK, their 2011 release, Live at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is an ep – and you can download it for free at Bandcamp. Argue is bringing this mighty crew to the Jazz Standard on Aug 29, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30 PM. Cover is not cheap – $30 – but if there’s any band alive who’re worth it, it’s this one.

The ep has only three tracks, but they’re epic. Recorded on a brief East Coast tour, they constitute some of the most sinister material from the 2009 Infernal Machines album. The first number, Ferromagnetic is pure Lynchian menace, opening with a sinister Bernard Herrmann noir twinkle, then Sebastian Noelle’s guitar twangs and the reeds flutter. A mean guitar riff circles as the orchestra pulses and the skies redden, then everybody drops out for a suspenseful bass-and-synth interlude. Is that Ingrid Jensen on the solo trumpet, echoing and sputtering, before the guitar, low reeds and brass move in with a grim anthem?   

Right where Jon Wikan’s polyrhythmic intro to the album’s mightiest number, Phobos, is about to shift from suspense to “drum solo,” bassist Matt Clohesy steps in with his macabre, modal riffs, echoed by the guitar.The title refers to the Mars moon destined to someday either crash into the planet or shatter from the force of gravity as it falls, an angst underscored by John Ellis’ big tenor sax crescendo. A bit later Noelle reemerges to shadow its increasingly frantic Tourette’s, the rest of the group following an ineluctable course.

The final cut is Transit, another dark masterpiece with the same blueprint: whispery intro, ominously chromatic, mantra-like riffage and variations. Space: the final destination. Jensen’s roller-coaster of a trumpet solo has to be heard to be believed: people practice their whole lives and never play something so thrilling. Recommend this to your friends who might not know the band. It’s as close to a bite-size introduction as there is and a rare gem in the ever-more-imposing Argue catalog.

Jorge Glem Makes Mighty Music With a Little Instrument at Lincoln Center

Jorge Glem is the Jimi Hendrix of the cuatro. He was the first to assemble a band of three cuatros, the C4 Trio, in which he refined his breathtaking technique and ability to play everything from folk tunes, to jazz of all sorts, to classical and grunge rock. More about that last style later. Thursday night at Lincoln Center, he reaffirmed his status as one of the most individualistically talented players in any style of music around the world.

Glem opened with Pez Volador (Flying Fish), backed by a rhythm section of Ricky Rodriguez on bass and Ari Hoenig on drums. The result turned out much more lush than anyone could have expected from just a little four-string instrument no bigger than a mandolin. Using his fingertips rather than a pick, Glem strummed out the pensively dancing, vallenato-tinged melody, Rodriguez adding a purposefully waltzing solo. From terse, muted, flamencoish lines, Glem worked his way up to seemingly effortless volleys of tremolo-picking as the trio wound up the song.

They went straight into jazz with the enigmatic variations and shifting syncopation of the second number, Bily, over Hoenig’s flickering rimshots. Again, Glem took his time working upward to fiery flurries of chords, through a handful of lively, incisive conversational moments between the three musicians. The slinky Por Alguien Como Tu, by Venezuelan composer Carlos Morean, got a mean funk intro and some wildfire cuatro glissandos before the three swung the clave with all sorts of dynamic variations that once again veered into the postbop arena, and then hints of Romany swing. Hoenig’s salsa accents at the end drew chuckles from those who were paying attention.

Pianist Luis Perdomo joined the group for Merengue Today, choosing his spots and then spiraling through rivulets of deep blues. After that big crescendo, there was nowhere for the rest of the band to go other than to simply tap out the rhythm. The quartet then approached the tropical classic Estate with a spare, summery, pensiveness and echoes of Gershwin, Glem picking out an incisive solo over Perdomo’s quietly stygian backing.

After a funny interlude where Glem voiced pretty much every south-of-the-border rhythm on his axe, he kicked on his loop pedal and layered one rhythm after another, a one-man salsa orchestra doing a well-known 90s grunge hit that turned out vastly better than the original. His mashup of Bach’s Toccata in D with the Venezuelan folk song Pajarilllo and no wave jazz was just as irresistible, a sizzling display of strumming, glissandos and ghostly rivulets of harmonics.

Pras Criancas by Hamilton de Holanda gave the band the chance to stretch out with shapeshifting tropicalia; last on the bill was Pablo Milanes’ De Que Callada Manera. The next free concert in the mostly-weekly series at the Lincoln Center atrium space on Broadway just north of 62nd St, is tomorrow night, Aug 23 at 7:30 PM with Congolese group the Soukous All Stars.