Dresser Waxes Eclectic in Homecoming

Jazz bassist Mark Dresser, who is becoming increasingly well-known in the new music realm, has roots in Los Angeles, where he cut his teeth in the ‘70s avant-garde jazz scene. Moving to New York a dozen years ago, he played with saxophonist Anthony Braxton and, on his own, scored silent films and generally maintained a cutting-edge profile.

Dresser’s homecoming of sorts, in the Monday Evening Concert series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, featured prepared pianist Denman Maroney and Swiss flutist Matthias Ziegler, among others, and kept experimental instincts at the forefront.

Dresser crosses over from jazz to classical music nicely because his music operates between the two fields. His interests in pure timbre, improvisation with sound as well as rhythm and matters of technique often transcend both idioms.

An atmospheric, overtone-rich wash of sound marked “Subtonium,” for the three players, while “Maronade” found Maroney displaying his piano effects amid chordal passages of haunting beauty. On “Invocation,” Dresser applied both hands to the fingerboard, with pull-offs and hammer-ons suggesting a pachyderm stampede in triplet rhythm.

Dazzling texturalist Ziegler played his solo piece, “Uakti,” on contrabass flute enhanced by electronics and vocalizing through the instrument. “Loss of the Innocents,” premiered here, mourns L.A.-based jazz titan Wayne Shorter’s wife and niece, who died in the crash of TWA Flight 800. Tuba player Bill Roper, cellist Erica Duke and clarinetist Anthony Burr realized the unusual elegy.

“Banquet,” the evening’s most structured work, found Dresser and Ziegler as protagonists in a quasi-concerto, supported by violinists Jeff Gauthier and Robin Lorentz, violist Marlow Fisher and cellist Duke. Chamber music-like patterns were passed around the stage, but they often yielded to improvisational abandon and weirdly chugging rhythms, as idioms switched clothes with aplomb.