David Torn is a guitarist, composer and producer, though the word order may depend on whom you consult. His career, stretching back more than 30 years, could easily be the work of several different people. He has carved a niche at the extreme end of guitar culture, while working extensively (and successfully) in film and commercial music. To call him a hero of the electric avant-garde would be accurate but incomplete.
On Tuesday night Mr. Torn made a relatively rare appearance at Joe’s Pub in celebration of “Prezens,” his new album on ECM. The show was sold out, and the house was suitably well stocked with guitarists. The stage was well stocked too, with an intimidating assemblage of amplifiers, electronics and what looked like a dozen effects pedals. At first glance it seemed clear which of Mr. Torn’s identities would take center stage.
Performing with Mr. Torn were the alto saxophonist Tim Berne, the keyboardist Craig Taborn and the drummer Tom Rainey; in another context they have a collective identity as Hard Cell, working mainly with the corkscrew compositions of Mr. Berne. But at Joe’s Pub, as on “Prezens,” they submitted to Mr. Torn’s sonic designs, which evolved, or perhaps just mutated, over the course of an hourlong group improvisation.
Disruption served as a compositional device throughout the set, which began with a rhythmic repetition by Mr. Taborn and some clucking sounds by Mr. Berne. Out of nowhere a broken beat exploded into being: Mr. Rainey’s entrance. Then the beat halted, just as abruptly. Into the expectant quiet Mr. Berne played a six-note saxophone pattern, which Mr. Torn electronically sampled, setting up a jagged funk groove.
Mr. Torn generated a precise scrum of feedback and oceanic noise, making expressive use of the tremolo arm on his guitar. When Mr. Taborn insinuated a new underlying pulse with his Fender Rhodes piano — a slow-burn vamp in 14/8 meter — Mr. Torn shifted more toward static. With one hand tweaking knobs on a console and one foot glued to a pedal, he seemed like a hybrid: the guitarist-as-producer, with the instrument serving as an interface.
“Prezens,” Mr. Torn’s first ECM album since “Cloud About Mercury” about 20 years ago, proposes a more radical mediation. Though it began as a series of free improvisations, Mr. Torn filtered and fractured the results, producing an ambitious compositional collage.
“It’s incredible,” Mr. Berne said of the album, in his role as onstage spokesman on Tuesday night. “It’s probably better than this,” he added with a chuckle, before the band plunged into action. He wasn’t serious or right, exactly, but on some level he had a point.
There's a funny line in "The Big Chill," of all things, that applies directly to David Torn. At one point, William Hurt is watching a late-night creature feature and remarks, in a smart-aleck aside, that "It's art, you just have to let it wash over you."
Mr. Torn's giddy onslaught Tuesday at Joe's Pub begs for just such an appraisal, but not in a jivey way. The gizmo-loving guitar hero is a rare enough sight on a New York City stage to explain the standing-room only house, though lately he's been popping up in odd corners, like Park Slope's low-key Tea Lounge, with his longtime sidekick, the alto saxophonist Tim Berne. It was with Mr. Berne and his frequent bandmates —keyboardist Craig Taborn and drummer Tom Rainey — that Mr. Torn performed at Joe's, surveying the group concept behind his new album, "prezens" (ECM).
Mr. Torn's quartet is committed to a dark, eruptive, oceanic sound in which overlapping bursts and fragments of rhythm, melody, and harmony sometimes crash violently against one another before ebbing into a translucent stillness. On the new album, recorded two years ago in Mr. Torn's Hudson River Valley studio and radically "magicked" by the guitarist in post-production, the effect is properly hallucinatory, but often more "chill." Mr. Torn, whose last ECM disc was 1987's "Clouds About Mercury," is a pioneer in sculpting ambient textures with guitars and electronics, using powerful rock dynamics fused to a slippery jazz flow. He digs that sound out from way in, the same kind of hermetic studio wizardry that Miles Davis and Teo Macero masterminded on the trumpeter's classic electric albums of the late 1960s and early '70s.
Onstage, however, the approach guarantees a head rush. On Tuesday, Mr. Torn alternated between two guitars and a blinking bank of electronics that looped and distorted snatches of music that had just been played, creating a mutant commentary on the group's basement space-lab chemistry. Often, the guitarist would stoke brief passages into an escalating frenzy of bent and elided notes, sustained as a plasmatic shimmer, while all of the other musicians seemed to busy themselves in their individual orbits: Mr. Berne chugging through cycles of horn riffs like a steam engine; Mr. Rainey slipping between the hyperkinesis of drum ‘n' bass rhythms and the atmospheric tremors of the tom-toms, and Mr. Taborn massaging his Fender Rhodes for appropriately spectral emanations from the 1970s jazzfunk continuum.
But if you thought the band was not entirely in synch, you weren't listening. The great fun of this sort of outfit is tuning deeply into its off-kilter percolations and bending an ear to discover how all the pieces fit together. It's as if the music, which had the feel of something improvised over some prearranged patterns, was a kind of unusual mechanism, like an eccentric Swiss watch — precise in peculiar ways. The deeper structure, rich in color and bustling sweat equity, consistently rewarded patient listening, especially when complex rhythmic ideas would arise, unite, and evaporate, propelling a transit from panic to trance.
In the meanwhile, it was often enough to revel in the warp-drive effusions of Mr. Torn's guitars, which unleashed a dynamic wallop that was rare to experience in the relatively snug and upscale confines of Joe's. Mr. Torn would not have to stretch too far if he decided to scale his music for theaters or arenas (just add amplifiers — lots!). The problem is that it's not 1971 and there is no Fillmore East: An audience of 150 is mighty good for geared-up displays of extravagant, sci-fi soundscapes. Everyone else, grab your headphones.
