Lincoln Center is determined to make the most of its newest space, the David Rubenstein Atrium — the former Harmony Atrium, on Broadway between 62nd and 63rd Streets — so it has packed it with attractions of all kinds, including free wireless Internet, a discount ticket booth, an information desk and a cafe.
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The soprano saxophonist Alex Hamlin with the rest of the Asphalt Orchestra in the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center.
It is also presenting Target Free Thursdays, a series of weekly free concerts, sponsored by Target. Most are pop, jazz and world music, with occasional glimpses of the experimental.
The Asphalt Orchestra, an idiosyncratic brass, woodwind and percussion ensemble that performed at the atrium on Thursday evening, embraces all those styles and more. Among the pieces in its set were arrangements (mostly its own) of songs by Bjork and the Swedish art-metal band Meshuggah; jazz by Charles Mingus; Afropop by Thomas Mapfumo; and a burst of avant-garde classicism by Conlon Nancarrow.
Asphalt is a new-music group disguised as a ragtag marching band. Its three percussionists play on elements of a miniature trap set, divided among them and slung around their necks, and the rest of the group — three saxophonists, pairs of trumpeters and trombonists, a sousaphonist and a piccolo player — play from miniature scores mounted as Rube Goldberg-like extensions of their clothing and instruments. Some wear hints of what might once have been band uniforms, and most carry megaphones across their backs, for song announcements.
The band rarely stands still, and the atrium, which stretches from Broadway to Amsterdam Avenue, is a perfect place for it. As the players filed in, playing Tyondai Braxton’s rhythmically sharp-edged “Pulse March,” they snaked through the audience, surrounded tables and moved toward the center of the atrium, sometimes in a line, sometimes in an amusingly chaotic wave.
By the end of the concert, they had hit nearly every corner of the space, with audience members following, scattering and regrouping as necessary: when you see a big guy with a sousaphone coming at you, you move pretty quickly.
The music sometimes seemed almost secondary to the party atmosphere, but people who came to listen found nuggets to admire. Frank Zappa’s quirkily harmonized “Zombie Woof” benefited from a hot, hard-driven performance, and the odd meters of Meshuggah’s “Electric Red” kept toe-tappers guessing. Nancarrow’s Study No. 20, in this group’s brassy timbres, could hardly have sounded more distant from the original, for player piano, but its point is rhythmic complexity, not coloration, and rhythm is this band’s strong suit.
But Asphalt was at its best in its finale, Goran Bregovic’s “Champagne,” a freewheeling, high-energy band score in which virtuosity, playfulness, compositional ingenuity and sheer visceral power mingle. It had both musicians and listeners dancing through the atrium.