No Stone Unturned

Improvisation is the soul of jazz and blues, but what happens when the spontaneous act of musical invention is freely embraced for its own sake? There's a broad wing of the contemporary music scene devoted to finding out. These artists may draw from any sort of tradition, and performances - such as the summit staged Friday at The Stone in the East Village - can become occasions for playful, bold excursions. Indulgence loomed, but was tartly dimissed.

The concert, billed as a "John Zorn Improv Party," was a benefit for the tiny, artist-run venue. Zorn, who runs the newly opened club, is a downtown New York composer and fiery advocate for new music. He straddles the worlds of jazz, classical, and experimental rock. Often, he scrambles them all together, working with dozens of musicians within his considerable orbit of influence. Several of those performers got together for the first of two hour-long sets, playing brief pieces in groupings of two, three or four.

Brevity encouraged wit. One of the most enjoyable encounters featured Min Xiao-Fen, who plays the pipa - or Chinese lute - with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, and Ikue Mori, a percussionist who uses a laptop and a processor to generate blurts, bleeps, blips and other sci-fi soundtrack effects. At its fleetest, the trio blurred definitions: they played a mirror game in which sounds created by one instrument glimmered in the others, stringed resonances whizzing through the air like a jai-alai ball. The Brazilian percussion master Cyro Baptista commanded ear and eye in his appearances. In a trio with bassist Shanir Blumenkranz and drummer Matt Wilson, he wielded a crazyquilt succession of bells, shakers. poppers, and whizzers, turning often child-like instruments into vessels of shaman-like intent - and absolute fun. And with Min Xiao-Fen he found a conspirator in humor. The musicians held their poker faces while tossing their far-flung cultural heritages into a zesty sonic mash: A mad scientist of rhythm versus a nimble-fingered mistress of ancient Chinese strum,

Zorn, himself, gave listeners familiar with his alto saxophone sound a "greatest-hits" display of extended techniques for stretching the instrument's vocabulary. He used circular breathing maneuvers that puffed his cheeks like an adder, pursing his lips and pestering the horn's valves to create squelchy volleys of notes, or an Audobon's gallery of bird cries. Even though it is old hat for insiders, it's always fun to hear Zorn in this mode, since so much of his current work is composition for other musicians to perform, or presented by his erstwhile jazz quartet Masada. It's a reminder of grittier days in the 1980s, when much of this music lacked a venue as accommodating as The Stone. (Named after the late jazz benefactor Irving Stone, known well to regulars at such venues as Tonic and the Knitting Factory).

Perhaps the most penetrating moment was provided by Courvoisier and Wilson. Their succinct duet, in which disparate strikes of the keys (and finger-traces across the piano strings, Henry Cowell-style) were interspersed with the bleats of car horns along 2nd Street, taught the value of silence as a sound itself. Wilson's squint at the presumptive end of the piece held the attentive audience silent on the cusp of applause. Honk! Then Courvoisier began a final trill.