“After many years of requests from Mr. John Zorn, I finally made a Jewish record.” That was the woodwind player Ned Rothenberg at Tonic on Thursday night, explaining the impetus behind “Inner Diaspora,” his new release on Mr. Zorn’s Tzadik label. Mr. Rothenberg added that his ensemble would be playing all the music from the album, in sequence. He probably didn’t intend for this to sound as dutiful as it did.
Ned Rothenberg, who played from his CD “Inner Diaspora,” on bass clarinet at Tonic on Thursday. Jerome Harris is in the background.
Then again, Mr. Rothenberg has professed some ambivalence about the idea of tapping his heritage for aesthetic purposes. Over the years he has specialized in free improvisation, a discipline — yes, discipline — with roots in the jazz and classical avant-garde. His most noteworthy cross-cultural activity has been a study of the shakuhachi, or Japanese bamboo flute. In a liner essay for “Inner Diaspora,” he lucidly articulates his preference for Buddhist and Taoist philosophies, while identifying himself as a secular Jewish artist.
“To define one’s Jewishness is itself fraught with ambiguity,” Mr. Rothenberg writes. The same sentiment might conceivably have come from Mr. Zorn, who has devoted most of Tzadik’s catalog, and hundreds of pieces for his Masada ensembles, to the exploration of what he calls radical Jewish culture. It’s no coincidence that two members of the Masada cohort, the violinist Mark Feldman and the cellist Erik Friedlander, feature prominently in Mr. Rothenberg’s new work.
At Tonic, as on the album, the string players joined Sync, Mr. Rothenberg’s regular collaboration with Samir Chatterjee on tabla and Jerome Harris on acoustic bass guitar and steel-string guitars. With Mr. Rothenberg variously on clarinet, bass clarinet, shakuhachi and alto saxophone, this added up to a rich reserve of timbres. His compositions, mostly bearing Yiddish titles and klezmerlike scales, made ingenious use of them.
On “Keyn Eynhore,” one of the strongest pieces, a bass ostinato in 7/4 time laid the groundwork for a melody shared by cello, clarinet and violin. Mr. Feldman took the first solo, keening microtonal patterns over a background of tabla and bass guitar. When he moved on to an insistent pizzicato, Mr. Rothenberg answered by clucking slap-tongued punctuation with his clarinet.
The percussiveness of that exchange continued through Mr. Friedlander’s improvisation, which was plucked rather than bowed. But when it was time for Mr. Rothenberg to take the lead, the atmosphere changed: Mr. Friedlander fingerpicked one incantatory bass-clef line, while Mr. Harris, using a slide, wobbled another.
Most of Mr. Rothenberg’s other compositions were similarly meticulous. “Fantazyor” featured a weaving melody for alto saxophone, while “Gilgulim” playfully conjugated a four-note motif. During one section of “Fuga Ladino,” the shifting texture of the ensemble suggested not Masada but Zooid, a signature ensemble of the multireedist and composer Henry Threadgill.
But it may have been “Minutia” that best illustrated Mr. Rothenberg’s ideals. He played shakuhachi on that theme, with accompaniment suggestive of a shapeless fog. In his “Inner Diaspora” notes, Mr. Rothenberg cites the piece as a conceptual link between Judaism and Buddhism; in performance it served, more simply but no less powerfully, as an interlude of deep placidity and concentration.
