A pleasant journey to the fringes

Poetic justice resonated with Thursday’s appearance of British composer Gavin Bryars, in this inaugural season for the REDCAT venue at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The black box theater is tucked away in a corner of the Disney complex, carved out of the downstairs parking lot. Fittingly, its offerings are off-to-the-side of mainstream repertoire.

Bryars, long an important figure deserving more attention in the U.S., has been making compelling and often hypnotic music on the fringes for decades. He was in town to work with the CalArts Millennium Players, who gamely presented four diverse Bryars works, an instructive compact portrait of the composer.

Experience as a bassist, a jazz musician and a mild-mannered renegade led Bryars to create an aesthetic in which simple means and direct expression are counterbalanced by a penchant for atmospheric conjuring. He’s on good speaking terms with Minimalism, Conceptual art, Pop art and Euro-jazz, but the 61-year-old composer has carved out his own niche.

Opening the concert was “Three Canadian Songs,” originally written for Holly Cole and presented at REDCAT for the first time without her. Over the chamber ensemble’s slowly swerving, jazz-colored harmonic changes, the impressive vocalist Harmony Jiroudek sang with an understated style reminiscent of Irene Abei’s work with Steve Lacy.

Bryars’ String Quartet No. 3 may have been the evening’s most traditional piece, but it carries the composer’s extra-traditional ideas, including a blend of early and late 20th century Minimalist ideas. A sad progression of chords, flitting harmonics and a dry, vibrato-rationed string approach leaped across centuries, to mesmerizing effect. A similar, surreal gentleness also pervades the percussion ensemble piece “One Last Bar, Then Joe Can Sing.” The title refers to the elaborate recasting of a measure from his opera “Medea” and his song-happy father, Joe.

Closing the concert, his Cello Concerto (“Farewell to Philosophy”) is a celebration of his love of lower string instruments. Originally written for cellist Julian Lloyd Weber (brother of Andrew), the dreamily slow, plaintive piece featured Colette Alexander, not so much riding a melodic course as floating along and slightly above the shifting terrain of the large ensemble, conducted by Marc Lowenstein.

A particular air of cool Bryars-esque melancholy hovered over much of the program. It always seems to be dusk or dawn in this music, bringing about a transitional emotional state full of cautious promise and not-unpleasant brooding.