JAZZ REVIEW : Pan Asian Arkestra Plays Pan Pacific Hybrid : ‘Tiananmen!,’ the featured work at Irvine Barclay Theatre, makes its political associations through stylistic inference and musical intensity.

San Francisco is rapidly becoming the home of the offbeat music collective. With such multi-stylistic groups as the Hieroglyphic Ensemble and the Pan Asian Arkestra turning up with increasing regularity, the Bay Area can take credit for generating some of the most fascinating new sounds of the last few years.

Thursday night’s appearance by San Francisco composer-pianist Jon Jang and the 11-piece Pan Asian Arkestra at the Irvine Barclay Theatre was a case in point. Jang--who organized the ensemble in 1988--has a long history of composing politically oriented works, usually performed by groups blending Chinese traditional styles with jazz.

Jang’s featured composition of the evening, “Tiananmen!” was a suite commemorating the 1989 pro-democracy uprising in China. Its five movements included references to Chinese folk songs, work songs and popular melodies, couched in Ellington-esque jazz textures and highlighted by extended individual soloing from the ensemble. Structured in an unfolding wave of discrete segments, the work made its political associations by stylistic inference and musical intensity rather than via any specific text.

The most unusual moments were provided by Zhang Yan, playing guzheng (a koto-like instrument) and Liu Qi-Chao, playing erhu (a two-stringed violin), suona (an oboe-like wind instrument) and sheng (similar to a large harmonica). Often, the melancholy sound of the erhu was combined colorfully with flute and soprano saxophone. The guzheng , with its enormous range of tonally variable strings, ranged from typically pentatonic Chinese melodies to clanging clusters of percussive dissonance.

Flutist James Newton (currently teaching at UC Irvine) was the headliner among the jazz players; his “Nelson Mandela” was one of two pieces that preceded the “Tiananmen!” suite. The other participants--Francis Wong and Melecio Magdaluyo on saxophones, Jim Norton on woodwinds, John Worley Jr. on trumpet, Jeff Cressman on trombone and Anthony Brown on percussion--were regulars in the Arkestra, with bassist Darik Oleszkiewicz a last-minute replacement.

Newton was, as always, a whirlwind of energy, often tailoring his solo excursions in reaction to the phrasing and the timbres of the Chinese instruments. The other musicians, though lesser-known, were no less accomplished. Drummer Brown, in particular, produced an astonishing array of sounds that effectively linked the dramatic bass-drum thumps and cymbal rolls of Chinese style with an urgent sense of jazz swing. Cressman’s solos stormed across the entire tradition of trombone techniques, and Magdaluyo revealed a remarkable capacity to transform Chinese folk melodies into blues-based, gospel-tinged improvisations.

Most important, Jang’s music--which also included an imaginatively orchestrated version of “A Night in Tunisia”--never took the easy step of falling back upon cultural atmosphere at the cost of creative content. It was an especially effective way to begin the Multicultural Arts Council of Orange County’s series of “Journeys in Jazz” at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.