As you like it David Gross’s gdg, plus Vijay, Joshua, and Me’Shell

The polemics of jazz can get pretty thick. So every once in a while it becomes necessary to check in with David Gross. Not because he challenges conventional notions about what jazz is, but because he challenges notions about what music is.

Gross, 33, has been a prominent activist on the Boston free-improv scene ever since he moved here, almost 10 years ago. And don’t mistake free improvisation for free jazz. Even with its freedom from regular meters or harmonic structure, free jazz is often defined by a driving rhythmic pulse and the hue and cry of vocalized instruments — vestiges of the blues and bebop licks. Gross and his cohort (he’s part of a vibrant Boston free-improv scene) strip music of all that — rhythm, standard pitch, tonality — and keep going. Although he plays free jazz as well (he’s worked with trumpeter Raphé Malik, formerly of Cecil Taylor’s band, and has his own version of a free-jazz trio called We Love You), he just as often works in a free-improv context.

Gross’s new solo alto-saxophone CD, Things I Found To Be True (Sedimental), which he’s released under the moniker gdg and will celebrate with a show at Zeitgeist Gallery on July 22, is far from free jazz. Instead of the late-Coltrane-like squalling, stamina-testing marathons one associates with free jazz, the 35-minute album is divided into nine short pieces, only one of which breaks the five-minute mark. And it’s very quiet. The "events" of each piece reveal themselves as clicking, breathing, sucking, grunting, whistling, moaning, humming, sighing, and only rarely making anything like a fully sounded saxophone note. For instance, Gross produces a wrinkly-plastic sound by dragging his mouthpiece cover up and down across the saxophone keys. All of this is recorded in loving audio-vérité by Scott Smallwood. Gross calls it a "headphone album."

Gross’s procedures owe as much to the European musique concrète tradition and more-recent British improvisers like Derek Bailey and the AMM ensemble as they do to American jazz, though there is a jazz precedent: Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) also looked to the serial procedures of European "concert" music and began to focus on sound itself as the basic formal element. Of course, when we get together at Café Paradiso in Harvard Square, Gross challenges me when I say the Chicago musicians were trying to eliminate form. "I think that’s ridiculous. Everything has a form, because it has a beginning and an ending. Things happen in time, which will give it some kind of form. And I’m definitely very aware of that when I play. I definitely think about ‘Okay, what happened when I started, what’s happening now?’ I used to be more concerned about these things in a how’s-this-going-to-end kind of way. And at a certain point I realized that that was limiting me. Being that concerned about the ending, I just couldn’t be in the moment."

Gross is aware that free improv isn’t always seen as listener-friendly by non-adepts, so Things I Found To Be True features clever/poetic titles ("Partially Buried Woodshed," "What Music Sounds Like," "The Language of the Blues Is on My Radar") and a cover painting of two shirtless boys that at first glance could pass for something from Picasso’s Rose Period. In fact it’s a painting by Gross’s grandmother of his father and his uncle. On the inside is a photo of a four-or-so-year-old Gross with her. The album is, he says, a kind of tribute, though the music isn’t "about" his grandmother, and even the titles connect with the music only in an abstract way.

Gross is a fan of all kinds of music, and he doesn’t draw distinctions among his various projects — "it’s all just music." At the Zeitgeist, he’ll play drums in his girlfriend Polly Hanson’s band, Cin Cin, with Mike Bullock (another free-improv player and Gross running buddy) on electric bass. Hanson used to be in the Athens Kindercore band Gritty Kitty; another member of that band, Jessica Slavich, will play solo as Glacier Park. Mike Tambura will play solo guitar "in sort of a John Fahey, new-folk" style.

But getting back to Gross’s gdg project: what are his own standards for a good performance? "When I improvise, it’s not as if I’m inventing the wheel. I have things that are in my bag. When you freely improvise, in the most basic sense all you’re doing is arranging the things in your bag. What about this idea? What about this idea? When it’s most successful is when it’s organized in the way that feels the most satisfying, that feels the most organic. The music simply reveals itself, and I don’t feel like I’m doing any work, I’m just sitting back and letting it happen. Which is what anyone would say. Which is what Yo-Yo Ma would say!"

CAUGHT LIVE. The 34-year-old pianist Vijay Iyer has been getting notice from awards groups and critics for a few years now in a number of contexts. He’s shown a taste for hip-hop and poetry working with the rapper/producer Mike Ladd on In What Language? (Pi, 2003). In his latest album with the cooperative trio Fieldwork, Simulated Progress (Pi), he plays motoric rhythms with saxophonist Steve Lehman and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee. The result is a tour de force; it’s also unvaried and exhausting.

At the Regattabar on June 29, though, he played an exciting 90-minute set with his current quartet (their first in the area, he said) in front of a modest but enthusiastic house. Here again was the taste for motoric rhythms, unvaried modal drones, or grounding rhythmic arpeggios. But there was a lot else going on too: odd meters, drifting chromaticism, Iyer’s daunting keyboard marksmanship (the detail of his playing comes across more clearly on the quartet’s new Reimagining, from Savoy), the fat, bright tones and rhythmic control of alto-saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. Bassist Stephan Crump created "long" meters by accenting odd, widely placed beats that Iyer and the remarkable 18-year-old drummer Marcus Gilmore subdivided and kneaded. It was a surging, layered, emotional sound, capped by Iyer’s dry political pronouncements. Iyer is worth the fuss.

At the Paradise back on June 25, Joshua Redman’s Elastic Band opened for Me’shell NdegéOcello in front of a house that was a mix of club kids, dating couples (hetero and lesbian), and older African-American jazz musicians. In the Elastic Band, drummer Jeff Ballard has replaced the Elvin-like looseness of Brian Blade (who is busy touring with Wayne Shorter) with a hard, thick, backbeat, and a high crack that he gets from a single timbale used like a snare. Sam Yahel’s keyboard was more notable for inventive bass lines than for solo flights, and guitarist Jeff Parker stayed in the background. It was Redman who provided the fireworks, playing muscling tenor solos over his fleet tunes, manipulating his sound with electronics.

But the real revelation was NdegéOcello, whose flamboyant eight-piece band made Redman and crew look buttoned down. A DJ (Jahi Sundance Lake) started things off, and the band followed, the diminuative leader scurrying back to her place by the bass amps, her shaved head at first covered by a keffiyeh head scarf.

As on her new Dance of the Infidel (Shanachie), NdegéOcello played Miles-like electric jazz. But it was the look as much as the sound that gave her set a subversive edge. She put tall, handsome percussionist Gilmar Gomes, in a ringer T-shirt, camouflage baseball cap, and patterned painter pants, upstage front and center; he stood there dancing and staring out into the audience. Trap drummer Chris Dave sat to his left, in football jersey and peaked knit cap, keeping the deep grooves with the leader and cueing changes with crackling press rolls. A three-piece horn section (including Oliver Lake) stood stage right. And pianist Michael Caine sat in the middle of the set-up playing two keyboards. By jazz standards, the configuration was just wrong, and the polyglot fashion statements only added to the effect. It was really something.

gdg + Glacier Park + Mike Tamburo + Cin Cin | Zeitgeist Gallery, 1353 Mass Ave, Cambridge | July 22 | 9:30 pm 617.876.6060