Prekop Plays Highly Crafted Mutations

As the front man for Chicago art-rock collective the Sea and Cake, Sam Prekop blends musical idioms until they dissolve into one another and become indistinguishable.

But no matter how far-flung his experiments, Prekop always places a high premium on crafting subtle, deceptively simple melodies that please through repetition. Which is why his sensibility is ideally suited to the kind of quasi-jazz material that the guitarist showcased at the Troubadour on Wednesday.

Accompanied by the same quartet of musicians that appear on his new solo album, Prekop kept things as placid as an unruffled lake. His material ambled and shuffled along to gentle yet forceful bossa nova rhythms, Prekop’s finger-picked riffs and wispy vocals.

Prekop self-consciously tries to conjure the ghosts of such jazz artists as Miles Davis and Wes Montgomery. At the Troubadour, he teased out two-chord modalities similar to the ones Davis used during his late-’50s cool jazz phase, and his trumpet player exclusively used a mute. But Prekop is too gifted a writer and performer to traffic in hollow revisionism. If he doesn’t exactly play proper jazz, his mutations are far more interesting than most of what passes for the real thing these days.