Every which way

Experimentalist Fred Frith's Cosa Brava mixes multiple musical worlds

Guitarist Fred Frith is used to playing multiple musical roles. A pioneering experimentalist who co-founded the avant-garde British rock band Henry Cow in 1968, he's a dauntingly prolific artist who works as a composer, educator, and globetrotting musical provocateur with a vast array of creative alliances. But there's one job title he's been lacking recently: bandleader. Longing to interact with a cast of musicians concentrating on an evolving body of material, last year he assembled Cosa Brava, a stylistically unfettered ensemble whose members span the outer rim of Frith's numerous musical worlds, from contemporary classical music and avant-garde jazz to progressive rock and experimental pop.

Featuring longtime Frith collaborator Zeena Parkins on accordion and synthesizer, 2 Foot Yard violinist/vocalist Carla Kihlstedt, drummer/vocalist Matthias Bossi, and sound designer the Norman Conquest (a.k.a. Norman Teale), Cosa Brava makes its Boston debut tonight at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

"Cosa Brava came together because it was an awful long time since I was in a band, since entering halls of academe, and there's something about being in a band I find essential to my well being," says Frith, 59, from his office at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., where he has been on faculty as professor of composition since 1999.

In his life as a new-music composer, Frith notes there's a certain abstraction involved, as he doesn't usually write pieces for specific musicians. In the best of circumstances, players get a few rehearsals before the premiere, and often they'll never play the compositions again.

"I'm used to that, but I recently saw the only live video of Henry Cow, from a 1978 Swiss TV broadcast, and I was blown away by how complicated the music was, and how assured and tight the band sounded. You can only do that by working and working and working," says Frith, who was awarded the 2008 Demetrio Stratos Prize last May for his career achievements in experimental music, an honor previously given to composer/vocalist Meredith Monk and avant-vocalist Diamanda Galás.

Frith created Cosa Brava as a vehicle for playing his multidirectional compositions. As a guitarist, he's honed an expansive sonic palette, employing found objects, unorthodox technique, and an abiding curiosity in the instrument's outer aural reaches.

Working with Bossi, who's the drummer and vocalist for the art rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, he developed a rhythmic vocabulary as the foundation for writing new material. With intermittent gigs over the past 18 months, the band has developed a wondrously textured body of music, alternating between concise instrumentals and through-composed songs featuring Frith's lyrics. Dense and spacious, quiet and keening, Frith's restless music refuses to settle into familiar categories.

"Our sound designer, Norman, is also a composer and conceptualist, and he rehearses with us all the time, inventing a sound world for each piece," Frith says. "The orientation is toward rhythmic, pulse-driven music. I can't escape my roots, so there's some folkloric aspects, but I don't have a concept about playing a certain kind of music."

In many ways Frith inhabits a musical landscape partly of his own making. No relationship better illustrates the way in which Frith's influence has spread in unpredictable directions than his nearly three-decade creative partnership with Parkins. They first met in the early 1980s when she was a student at Bard College, studying classical piano, and he arrived at the school for a performance with drummer Chris Cutler, late of Henry Cow.

"They were kind of mysterious creatures," recalls Parkins, who's most visible these days for her electric harp work with Björk.

Upon arriving in New York City in 1984, she quickly became an essential ingredient in the roiling downtown scene through her work with John Zorn, Butch Morris, and Elliott Sharp (mostly players with whom Frith was active). Before long she had joined Frith's avant-rock band Skeleton Crew and later toured with his repertory rock sextet Keep the Dog.

Like Frith, Parkins has worked extensively with dance companies (winning three Bessie Awards for her scores), and brings a composer's sensibility to Cosa Brava. Though she did a two-year residency with the Museum of Fine Arts from 1998 to 2000, Parkins has rarely performed publicly in the region.

"It had been about 10 years since I'd done an ongoing project with Fred, and that period was a big one for me, since I've been with Björk, and I've come much more in the world in terms of presenting my own work," Parkins says. "Cosa Brava was going back to the source, to a very important influence, and I thought it would be interesting to see what that would feel like. And it feels great."