MUSIC REVIEWS : New Winds Blow at Harbor Art Museum : Music: Program of 10 mostly improvisational works closes 1991 Contemporary Culture Series.

New Winds brought a fusion of jazz and classical, East and West, to its concert at the Newport Harbor Art Museum on Saturday night. The program of 10 largely improvisational works--last of the museum’s 1991 Contemporary Culture Series--demonstrated both technical adeptness and musical inventiveness.

The trio of composer-performers--Robert Dick, J.D. Parran and Ned Rothenberg--offered a multicultural display of instruments, which they blended as equals, partially through the assistance of sound engineer D.J. Killeen, who made sure that quieter instruments would speak along with or above more naturally penetrating ones.

Familiar and not-so-familiar woodwinds were called upon to produce an extended sonic vocabulary. Most of the pieces employed this full language for more integrated outcomes. Rothenberg’s “Continuo After the Inuit” put multiphonics to use in a long solo for alto saxophone. “Greenhouse,” another solo--this one by Dick, for flute--is a blues tribute to the late Jimi Hendrix and his “Red House.” The harmonies, if not the 12-bar form, are there. But this demanding work draws from a large bag of tonguing and blowing methods, to create soulful ambience.

Two pieces--”Birds of a Feather,” a collaborative effort, and “Caterpillar/Fish Sign” by Parran and Floyd LeFlore--simulate animal sounds.

In “Birds of a Feather,” Dick twittered on an a-flat piccolo while Parran and Rothenberg ran through a collage of calls on clarinets for a wholly improvised parody.