Marty Ehrlich & Dark Woods Ensemble: Classical That Cooks

Mix jazz and classical and you're asking for trouble. When classical composers shoot for jazz, the results can be fussy and unswinging (partly because they work with non-jazz performers). When jazz guys do classical, you get Webernesque noodling that badly needs an editor. Marty Ehrlich has spent a career mixing techniques as both a player and a composer, to the point where he can now do it seamlessly. His Dark Woods ensemble -- a trio that includes Ehrlich on clarinets and flute, cellist Erik Friedlander, and bassist Mark Helias -- played at the Dante Alighieri Cultural Center in Cambridge on Saturday night. They sawed at their instruments in abstract, arrhythmic fits and starts, or else blew boplike lines over a regular pulse. Either way, they cooked.

Their opening "Dance #1" was typical. The three players tossed a tempo-less melodic fragment around on bass clarinet, pizzicato bass, and bowed cello. With Helias's two-beat rhythmic stops serving as a channel marker, the short motifs gradually extended into longer lines, building up to one longish statement from Ehrlich. Then a two-beat break, a pause, and the ensemble began again from fragments, building this time to a long unison bass-clarinet-and-cello line. The piece stopped again, Helias took a short bass break, then was joined by clarinet and cello. It ended with Ehrlich blowing longish delicate lines while bass and cello percolated behind him.

Ehrlich's pieces can start any way, but their basic urge is always toward melody and swing, even when they're trying with all their might to avoid standard 4/4 grooves or verse-chorus resolutions. The world premiere "Lose Your Number" began with a long pastoral line stated in unison by clarinet and bowed strings. The theme bloomed into dissonant harmonies, broke for a clarinet solo that grew into agitated squawks, and then came down to a hush, with cello and bass moaning hymnlike behind it. The medium-uptempo "Light at the Crossroads" was based on a funky riff theme and popped with bluesy solos. All three players stretched out on solos here, Helias plucking and Friedlander bowing, both building their statements jazzlike with repeated rhythmic patterns. Ehrlich's solo clarinet line, which expanded in volume and tempo, was exuberant.

You can understand Ehrlich's attraction to this ensemble (their new double-CD, Live Wood, is on the Music & Arts label). Without piano and drums, there's an easy flow between foreground and background, dynamics are a snap (especially in the Alighieri's resonant hall), textures can be indulged, and every detail sounds. And the music is always emotionally grounded. Ehrlich called his "Cinema Ciak" (about a movie theater in Milan) "a theme in search of a movie," and its minor-keyed folklike melody had a nostalgic lilt. On "The Adding Song," his bass clarinet was keening, cantorial, and built up to the piece's stately, long-lined theme. When percussion was called for, Helias tap-tapped the body of his bass or Ehrlich popped a flute's air hole with his pinky. At one point, his flute mimicked the wind that whistled out in Kendall Square. It was music without boundaries.

-- Jon Garelick