Swan songs

What do the Icelandic chanteuse Bjork and jazz have in common? Travis Sullivan has an idea.

It's no secret that jazz has been a tough sell for decades, and things have only gotten tighter in these "American Idol" years. When you've based your 18-piece big band on the music of the idiosyncratic Icelandic pop pixie Bjork, you're practically begging for an uphill climb.

Such are the self-made circumstances for Travis Sullivan's undaunted Bjorkestra. Traveling in the San Francisco Bay area for a series of gigs last month, Sullivan was excited to hear a local disc jockey playing a track from "Enjoy!," the four-year-old band's new debut album.

"We were psyched," recalls the New Hampshire native. Then the DJ proceeded to mangle the band's name, identifying it as "Travis Sullivan's By-Jork-estra."

That was funny, Sullivan says. Not funny ha-ha; funny in a rueful, what-are-you-gonna-do kind of way.

Still, things are looking up for Sullivan and his merry band of musical pranksters. They recently opened the SF Jazz Festival's spring season. They've been sharing bills with experimentally compatible groups such as the Sun Ra Arkestra and the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, and they have been joined onstage by such contemporary jazz guitarists as Berklee alumnus Kurt Rosenwinkel and New England Conservatory faculty member Ben Monder.

In what has become a bit of a homecoming ritual for bandleader Sullivan, Bjorkestra returns to Boston Wednesday to perform at Scullers. "I used to go there all the time when I was going to UNH," he says.

Growing up in Exeter, where he attended public school, Sullivan played alto saxophone in his high school band. The budding musician befriended a classmate who was equally smitten with John Coltrane's late-period free-jazz explorations.

"The first jazz I got into was Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman," Sullivan recalls. "I can't say I understood that music then, but I know it hit me in a certain way." He discovered jazz largely on his own. His parents, he says, listened to oldies and country music - "WOKQ-type [stuff]," he says with a laugh.

They did, however, encourage him to choose a musical instrument. "I think they were just glad I wasn't interested in sports, so they didn't have to drive me around as much," he jokes.

After taking private lessons at Berklee with saxophonist George Garzone, Sullivan moved to New York, where he studied classical piano and 20th-century music theory at the Manhattan School of Music. On a whim, he based one of his earliest big-band arrangements on Bjork's "Hyperballad."

"I wrote eight bars and then put it away for three years," he says. "When I finally finished it, I thought, 'I could write another.' "

Sullivan says his inspiration came not so much from tribute bands as it did from the song cycles of classical composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Aaron Copland. "Copland wrote a song cycle based on Emily Dickinson poems, and Debussy did the poems of Mallarme and other French poets. That was sort of my approach."

Somewhat less influential, he says, was the deep jazz tradition of interpreting pop tunes: "Halfway into this, I didn't see a definite model for any artist doing something to the extent I was doing it," he says. "I went out and got 'Gil Evans Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix.' No disrespect to Gil, but I thought, 'I can do this a lot better.' "

He has plenty of help from singer Becca Stevens, who, like Bjork, has a knack for unconventional inflection. Interpreting Bjork's singing style, says Sullivan, is "similar to assimilating Billie Holiday. There are a lot of parallels, actually, in terms of nuance. They're both incredibly distinct. The minute you imitate her, people go, 'Oh, that's Bjork.' "

The arrangements on "Enjoy" befit Bjork's own catholic interests, ranging from the guitar-heavy downtown funk of "Army of Me" and the danceable reggae groove of "Human Behavior" to the murky mystique of "Hunter." Far from boxing him in, Sullivan says, the singer's complex music lends itself freely to metamorphosis.

Bjork's international fans, well known for their fanaticism, often make up the bulk of Bjorkestra's audience, even at jazz festivals. "I hate to say it," says Sullivan, "but they're maybe a little more open-minded than jazz fans."

Bjork demands open-mindedness from her audience at every turn, often collaborating on multimedia work with her significant other, the avant-garde conceptual artist Matthew Barney. If she is famous outside her global ring of admirers, it is for her stubborn eccentricities, epitomized by the notorious swan dress she wore at the 2001 Grammy Awards.

And if that ungainly costume has become the default parody of the kooky singer from Iceland, the members of Bjorkestra welcome the fact that it has made her a familiar personage even to those who don't recognize her music. Rather than bemoaning the fact that the singer has been reduced to a single, cartoonish public image, Sullivan embraces it as a conversation starter.

"At some point," he jokes, "I'm going to make sure everyone in the band is wearing swan dresses."