Tortoise Reclaims Fusion in Thrilling Show

It was a heartening, if incongruous, sight: Hundreds of Gen-X and -Y hipsters sitting attentively in UCLA’s Royce Hall on Friday to hear a band play demanding instrumental music.

For that band, Tortoise, it was a peculiarly subversive triumph. Longtime fixtures of Chicago’s fertile avant-rock scene, the protean quintet has recently embraced fusion, that often maligned marriage of rock and jazz that thrived during the early ‘70s, as an organizing principle. But in this nimble band’s able hands, fusion is something worth reclaiming.

At Royce Hall, Tortoise’s music echoed the meditative, angular sound of Miles Davis’ early experiments with amplified instruments, back before fusion became synonymous with hollow virtuosity. But it was also a lot more. Embedded deep within Tortoise’s rigidly patterned compositions was the pointillist minimalism of Steve Reich, the tricky time signatures and squonky atonality of Frank Zappa and the placidly astringent melodies of guitarist Sonny Sharrock.

Compositions would drift into the ambient ether, then click snugly into place. There was virtually no soloing, and no fixed point of reference. Band members kept switching instruments, so that there might be, say, three members playing vibes, or two drummers tapping out a fierce polyrhythm.

Tortoise freely dipped into experimental music’s rich legacy, but it was also resolutely contemporary, with a gurgling, electronic undertow that brought to mind techno outfits such as Oval and Mouse on Mars. To watch Tortoise resolve those conflicts--between noise and beauty, abstraction and structure--made them a thrill to behold.