Ensemble’s mix is a classic alternative

After his concert at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday, Paul Bailey spoke to the audience about his ongoing adventure, the Paul Bailey Ensemble -- an “alternative classical garage band.”

Fair enough: The cheeky description points to the group’s self-reliant, can-do spirit and its intention to mix high and low culture, art and pop. Fittingly, the setting was the casual Sierra Room, where the audience sat at tables as if in a new-music cabaret.

A balanced grouping of strings, woodwinds, guitar, bass, keyboard, vibraphone and sometimes vocalists, the ensemble consists of classically trained and impressively focused players who create an appealing, collective sound. Bailey, a trombonist, educator and composer, formed the group in 2002 as a do-it-yourself forum outside the usual and limited channels of classical music presentation.

Stylistically, the ensemble is very much locked into the Minimalist groove. The Cerritos concert was well-stocked with repetitive lines, easygoing tonalities, and undulating cascades of eighth notes, reminding us of the comforting, even old-fashioned, charm of the Minimalist style.

In the concert’s first half, instrumental pieces from Bailey’s suite “Summerland” and guitarist Sean R. Ferguson’s “Chopping Tool” offered their rhythmically chugging energies, more about ensemble machinery than melodic or thematic development. These fed directly from the inspirational trough of such classic Minimalist recordings as Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” and Philip Glass’ “Glassworks.” The inclusion of electric guitar (Ferguson) and bass (Matt Menaged) nudge the sound more toward a rock aesthetic, thanks to our associative connection with those tools.

This program’s main attraction came after intermission, with the world premiere of Bailey’s ambitious “Retrace Our Steps,” ostensibly written for mezzo-soprano Nicole Baker. She sang key parts in the four-movement work, with text that included cryptic poetics by Gertrude Stein and socio-philosophical tracts by Guy Debord and Jenny Bitner. But Baker ultimately became a team player and folded into the democratic mesh of the ensemble’s conjuring of nine instrumentalists and four additional vocalists.

One unsettling aspect of an otherwise engaging concert was the canned texture of sound processed through microphones, allowing acoustic instruments to compete with electronic ones. Then again, that is a hallmark of Minimalism, which borrows from pop’s sound palette and equipment list on the path to a new classical paradigm. In short, the Paul Bailey Ensemble is out of the garage and on the way up.