By Jon Garelick

The whole band demonstrated an expressive variety of mark-making, as visual artists like to say: lines and squiggles and blotches, graceful or rude.

Steven Bernstein and Sexmob, at the Regattabar on June 19

Sexmob at the Regattabar. Photo: Paul Robicheau

The intro at the Regattabar on Thursday night was “Thirty years of Sexmob!” The band’s frontman, Steven Bernstein, demurred that 30 years didn’t necessarily mean that the band was tight. “That’s not our bag,” he said.

But Sexmob’s brand of cohesion, manifested on that evening, was about another kind of tight: an ability to capitalize on missed cues as well as sharp twists in the written score, a trust in one another’s spontaneous impulses, and a willingness to surprise themselves, knowing that a surprise for the musicians more often than not pays off with a surprise for the audience. When those surprises clicked, they were met with appreciative hoots of laughter, from the audience and the band.

Steven Bernstein of Sexmob at the Regattabar. Photo: Paul Robicheau

Born in the ferment of ’90s downtown New York — the Knitting Factory to be exact, where, Bernstein told the crowd, he had to come up with a name for a band to play “for a hundred bucks and free beer” — Sexmob has always had a cheeky theatrical bent that’s part avant-garde jazz and part punk rock. Bernstein himself has a storied career as an arranger and collaborator with the likes of John Lurie (the Lounge Lizards), Hal Wilner, Levon Helm, Henry Butler, Elton John, and Aretha Franklin, plus multiple film-scoring gigs and any number of solo projects including Sexmob. A big part of the band’s book is made up of film score nuggets and pop covers — Prince to the Cardigans, Nirvana to Nino Rota. And always, a healthy dollop of Ellington.

At the Regattabar, the band began with cymbal shimmers from drummer Kenny Wolleson and Briggan Krauss’s soft alto sax warble, then a quietly insistent ostinato from bassist Tony Scherr. Then a declamatory entrance from Bernstein’s slide trumpet. There were answering phrases from Krauss, and a gentle melody began to emerge — Rota’s title theme from Fellini’s Amarcord, with Scherr’s bass now dancing to an undulating tango. There was a sudden upshift in tempo and dynamics, whinnying cries from Bernstein, and the beat moved into a hard groove. The piece eventually came back to Rota’s theme, Krauss now in a soft, high clarinet range, and another shift into a klezmer dance, Bernstein’s slide trumpet affecting a cross between a penny whistle and a distorted electric guitar. In one quiet moment, Wolleson played a few muted bars on cymbals like a little tin-can tap dance.

Tony Scherr of Sexmob at the Regattabar. Photo: Paul Robicheau

There was much more that happened in the 25 minutes or so of that first tune that would set the template for the evening: Bernstein and Krauss trading melody leads, one “comping” with squawks or squeals as the other assayed the theme, coming out of some particularly frenzied maelstrom to land squarely in unison. Scherr would set ostinato vamps with Wolleson or move in and out of free conversations with the drummer or the horns. At times, Wolleson would trigger some soft electronic percussion effects, like a ping-ponging African slit drum. There were some hard funk grooves — especially on Bernstein’s “Syrup” and “Lawn Mower.” A tune that Bernstein introduced as a “world premiere” was named on the spot as “Portrait of a Chickadee,” after an answer from the audience to Bernstein’s query of the name of the Massachusetts state bird. It was set to walking-bass swing with brushes and had a nice boppish lilt to it, with hints of Monk. There was a lovely, broad-ranging take (Bernstein called it a “fantasy”) on Ellington’s “Don’t You Know I Care.” Bernstein introduced it as a Juneteenth tribute “about the diverse power of the American situation.”

What else? A straight-faced version of Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times,” Ellington and Strayhorn’s “Star-Crossed Lovers”(with Krauss on baritone), a Scherr solo in which the bassist riffed with himself, playing a melody against a rhythm pattern, and another in which an upper-register sequence conjured the delicate harp song of an African kora.

There was a lot of talking — and not just from Bernstein, who showed crack stand-up timing aside from the occasional off-mic verbal cues to the band (“C-chord!”). But you could hear it also in his modulating slide-trumpet timbre. Bernstein has said that he chose the instrument so that he wouldn’t have to think about comparisons to other players. But his unpretty tone, and his phrasing, approximate speech. As do the variety of sounds coming from Krauss, whose range of command shows that he can play pretty when required. The whole band demonstrated an expressive variety of mark-making, as visual artists like to say: lines and squiggles and blotches, graceful or rude. It was all part of their ongoing conversation, with each other and with the audience.

Kenny Wollesen of Sexmob at the Regattabar. Photo: Paul Robicheau

When an audience member coughed loudly during Bernstein’s opening remarks, he responded with an invitation to more “audience participation…. All sounds are fine with us.”

Plenty of bands play jazz differently than Sexmob. And yes, given Bernstein’s caveat, there may be a few who are “tighter.” But I’ve never seen a band that was more fun.

Jon Garelick can be reached at garelickjon@gmail.com.