Rez Abbazi. Photo Credit: Jazz Music Archives.

“I’m having a brain…you know,” sighed guitarist Rez Abbasi, out of breath and close to speechless after a full-throttle rendition of “Onus on Us”. After such a wildly evolving piece, a bit of brain freeze is understandable – perhaps even inevitable. Under the band name Invocation, Abbasi’s five-member powerhouse took the Jazz Standard by a storm in a CD release concert for the new album Sonu Sonu, echoing a soul-drenched heartiness truly akin to invocative prayer.

An ingeniously uncanny duet of sorts opened the evening on “Thanks for Giving”. Rudresh Mahanthappa’s signature sax slurs swelled into nearly pitch-perfect harmony with Abbasi’s eclectic and fluid guitar riffs, both musicians rising and dipping in tandem with tense melodicism. Though this pairing soon whittled down to subtly agitated momentum, the most captivating aural duel arose from two unlikely battlers: the piano and the drums, courtesy of Vijay Iyer and Dan Weiss.  The latter’s rolling rhythms brewed the tune forward with a charming blatant quality, led by a rippling snare drum, then outright bangs – until settling upon assertive drumstick on drumstick beats. Iyer broke into Weiss’ acerbic bubble with warm classicism, bringing forward a lightly authoritative tone to flip the aggressive band dynamic upside down. This convoluted dichotomy danced upon the divide between intriguing discord and jarring discombobulation, setting the scene for all pieces to come.

“Onus on Us” leaned toward an appealing avant-garde disjointedness, though infused with graceful breaks into harmony to quell the impact. Mahanthappa brought a trumpet-like, blaring brassy propulsion to his sax, meanwhile bassist Johannes Weidenmueller set forth a gently audible bounciness, rooted in classic jazz. Abbassi’s guitar assumed the smooth-mannered fluency of a crooning vocalist, tousling through the higher pitches. And further piling onto the tune’s expanding textural repertoire was a rock-inspired Weiss, gloriously playing with a drumstick held in his mouth – and, eventually, with only his hands. The sum of these hotly opposing instrumental parts dissolved into a surprising anticlimactic tenderness. Iyer and Weidenmueller rose from the grandiose midst in a soft but willful duet, rolled forward by pondering piano tones and halted by commanding plucks of rich bass.

Though the band showed impeccable balance amid many near-dives into rhythmic and textural overload, “Nusrat” did slip over the discordant edge. Abbasi’s calmly meandering solo opened the tune with Hindi undertones and electric coolness, uniting his Middle Eastern and eclectic contemporary jazz inspirations with an effortless appeal. But as soon as Weiss and Mahanthappa delved in, a lack of distinctive rhythmic progression steadily swirled the piece into a muddle of unrest.  The drummer’s forward momentum took a caustic leap into intrepid cymbal slams, pungently interjected by marathon blurts of saxophone, courtesy of Mahanthappa’s virtuosic lungs. Iyer, Weidenmueller, and even Abbasi were drowned out by the argumentative uprising. Some ground did eventually settle beneath the tune’s restless feet, however, in the form of Iyer’s crystal-clear, timeless brilliance. Alongside a cruising cymbal array from a toned-down Weiss, his cerebral piano infused the piece with a refreshing, catchy groove, conjuring the conversational ease of George Gershwin.