Jazz with hot sauce

You won’t hear them much on the radio. You won’t see them at any of Los Angeles’ more mainstream jazz hubs, like Catalina’s or the Jazz Bakery. You won’t read much about them in the local press, aside from the odd review.

So where can you glimpse the underground world of L.A.’s genre-fusing jazz improvisers? At a Salvadoran restaurant in Culver City, Carlos Rodriguez’s Con Sabor Club Tropical. On the weekends, this elegantly colorful restaurant offers live salsa and bachata music with affordable, authentic fare. Now, on Thursdays, Con Sabor Club Tropical is carving out a separate identity as a home to L.A.’s burgeoning community of intrepid jazzers.

If the combination of pupusas and experimental music sounds a bit outre, that’s what the new Cryptonight music series is all about: a place where the unexpected unsettles the familiar. A soaring neoclassical melody on electric violin is disrupted by an explosion of four-part improvisation, as a quartet like the Jeff Gauthier Goatette morphs from chamber music to straight-ahead jazz to a soundscape by Nels Cline, teasing the strings of his guitar with a metal whisk.

The series is the brainchild of L.A.-bred violinist Gauthier, whose classical background performing with groups such as the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera has shaped his jazz aesthetic. His influences range from Bartok to Bill Evans, from Messiaen to Miles Davis, with a heavy dose of Ralph Towner’s Oregon.

Gauthier knows that an evening of unfettered improvisation is not everyone’s idea of a good time. “If one is subjected to an evening of entirely free improvisation, you do run the risk of having it get out of control and losing an audience,” says the soft-spoken Gauthier. “But when it is included inside the context of composition and with some kind of guidelines, it provides for a certain spark that can really bring a piece of music alive.”

On a recent Thursday night, the venue is giving off a relaxed, loungey vibe. Mirrors and potted plants accent the softly lighted lime green room. Couches line the performance area where music fans sit back and listen intently. Small cafe tables are filled with an artsy, eclectic crowd, sipping margaritas, finishing their food or chatting quietly until the music begins to intrigue. Many are fellow musicians, grad students or visual artists themselves.

G.E. Stinson’s Splinter Group begins jamming over trancelike beats, with vocalist Kaoru intoning a lyric while exploring a wide range of percussive instruments -- bottles, toys, a pink plastic tube.

“I keep forgetting to eat,” patron John Lewis says before returning to his pollo a la plancha. An engineer at KCRW, Lewis heard about the series by word of mouth, which is how most of this music gets promoted, he says. “This is the most interesting place I’ve ever seen this band,” Lewis says. “I like it. It’s tough in L.A. It’s not like New York, where you can get this type of music every night in certain venues. Here this music has always gone venue to venue.... Part of the problem is the lack of radio play. So the audience has always really been acquaintances of acquaintances who know about the band.”

In this new series, Gauthier is looking for music that departs from convention without disposing of it entirely -- or, as he puts it, “something that involves interesting composition as well as improvisation ... and it would be really nice if it swings.”

The series began as a place to promote the artists on Gauthier’s Cryptogramophone record label, musicians who have been the cornerstones of the jazz avant-garde scene for decades. His 23-artist roster includes such musicians as guitarist G.E. Stinson, pianist David Witham, drummer Alex Cline, guitarist Nels Cline, bassist Steuart Liebig and woodwind player Vinny Golia, whose own Nine Winds record label paved the way for Cryptogramophone.

Yet the series has quickly expanded into a home for non-Cryptogramophone artists as well, local treasures like drummer Billy Mintz and keyboardist James Carney. It has also become a destination for Bay Area guitarist Bill Horvitz and the New York-based Andrea Parkins, who plays piano, accordion and sampler. Guitarist Mark O’Leary will be coming from Ireland.

“He received a grant from the Irish government to do some collaboration, and he decided he wanted to come to L.A. and work with some of these musicians,” Gauthier says. “That’s another one of those instances where you realize this community is more known out of town than it is in town.”

NELS CLINE, who performs regularly with many of these artists and with numerous bands that cross over into the punk scene, helped plan the series. “I’m seeing more curiosity on the part of some of the promoters and writers in Europe about the L.A. scene than ever before,” Cline says. “If you look at what’s been going on here in a scholarly way, you are going to find out that there has been a lot happening of considerable quality all this time, and it’s a great scoop.”

Yet these musicians remain optimistic that they will someday find a wider audience here in L.A. “I think people here are getting fed up and are looking for something to listen to, something to break out of the classic rock or bebop jazz mold,” says pianist Witham, who handles booking for the series and performs tonight with his own Neon Hunter Collective. “There are people here who have imagination and are not so closed off that they can’t be accepting of some new sounds and new approaches. I think it’s just a matter of tapping them on the shoulder and saying, ‘Hey, we’re here. We’ve got this thing going on.’ ”

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Cryptonight

Where: Con Sabor Club Tropical,

8641 Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: Thursdays, 8 p.m.

Price: $10; $5 students with ID

Info: General, (310) 559-1127; concert, (310) 287-1918. Or www.cryptonight.com.