New adventure with Rubisa Patrol

Pianist Art Lande and the group Rubisa Patrol first surfaced in the ‘70s, when jazz was trying on sounds and styles from numerous other genres. The quartet’s reunion at the Jazz Bakery on Monday -- with original members Lande, trumpeter Mark Isham, bassist Bill Douglas and percussionist Kurt Wortman -- was a potent reminder of their music’s inherent potential for adventure.

Unlike pop reunions, which tend to emphasize a recycling of old hits, get-togethers by former jazz associates often reveal the still-rich musical lodes existing in genres such as avant-garde jazz, New Orleans jazz, swing and jazz fusion. The Rubisa Patrol’s performance recalled a style embracing elements ranging from free-jazz improvisation and contemporary classical music to rhythms from other world music, a style also adopted by groups such as Oregon, Paul Horn and the Paul Winter Consort.

Despite the fact that this was essentially a one-night, two-set reunion by players who have not worked together on a regular basis for more than two decades, the music was filled with well-played creative delights.

Isham’s deep involvement with film music has not diminished his powers as an instrumentalist, and his soloing, even in the most unstructured passages, was the unerring product of a compositional imagination. Douglas and Wortman smoothly accomplished the difficult task of moving the rhythm coherently from wide-open spaces to in-the-pocket grooves.

But it was Lande who pulled all the high-flying pieces together. On one number, he added some intensely atmospheric spoken-word passages. In others, he reached inside the piano to coax plucked, stroked and hammered responses from the strings. Add to that his whimsical between-tunes comments, his ability to pull his listeners into the interaction of group improvisation and the quality of his music, and one could only hope for another, more extended reunion.