The Vandermark 5

Ken Vandermark, Chicago’s free-jazz ambassador to the world, often looks outside of music for inspiration. Like 2005’s The Color of Memory, the last record for the Vandermark 5, he dedicates many tracks on the new A Discontinuous Line to designers (furniture pioneers Charles and Ray Eames), visual artists (the presurrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico) and photographers (Dust Bowl journalist Walker Evans). Rather than come across as pedantic, these admissions make this record that much more fun to follow.

With the addition of amplified cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and the subtraction of trombonist Jeb Bishop last year, the V5 closed one door but opened another: Lonberg-Holm is a jazz Swiss Army knife, able to carve out a searing 7/4 hard-rock riff one minute or disharmonious quietude the next. And hearing double bassist Kent Kessler and Lonberg-Holm together—the two instruments only a few octaves apart—recalls the dual-bass setup of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time Band.

Bob Weston (Mission of Burma), indie-rock engineer to the gods, faithfully captures these swerving contours: Tim Daisy restlessly tickling out a pattern on the snare rim and hi-hat; Lonberg-Holm chasing his own tail up and down the strings of his amplified cello; Kessler making needlepoint indentations on his ebony neck; and Vandermark and Dave Rempis’s full-bore attacks on reeds out front. On “Reciprocal,” dedicated to the Spanish architect behind the otherworldly Milwaukee Art Museum, Santiago Calatrava, the sheer velocity of the designs comes bowling out of Rempis and Vandermark’s bells. Culture vultures don’t always produce substantial art but Vandermark, happily, shows us otherwise.—Matthew Lurie

The Vandermark 5 plays Velvet Lounge Wednesday 7.