With Go Home, Goldberg returns to jazz roots

Coming of age in the 1970s, he absorbed the insistently experimental ethos of soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, first gaining national notice with the New Klezmer Trio, a seminal vehicle for radical Jewish culture that paved the way for John Zorn’s Masada.

At a cafe near his house in Berkeley on a recent sun-splashed morning, Goldberg talked about Go Home as the latest milestone in a winding journey from avant-garde exploration to rootsy syncopation. Featuring seven-string guitar wizard Charlie Hunter, groovaholic drummer Scott Amendola, and veteran trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, the band makes its Boston-area debut on Tuesday at the Regattabar.

“Go Home has given me a new set of challenges,’’ said Goldberg, 50, who’s been most visible in recent years with the world chamber ensemble Tin Hat. “I started thinking a lot more about melody and harmony and groove, and playing some music that’s a little more meat and potatoes. The goal isn’t to get someplace really far out. It’s to find home and go there.’’

The road home runs directly through Hunter, who provided the initial inspiration for the band. Determined to work with the guitarist, Goldberg started writing a sheaf of new tunes marked by concise, earthy melodies, spacious harmonies, and lowdown beats.

Trumpeter Ron Miles appears on the band’s recent eponymous album, and when he couldn’t tour with the group Goldberg recruited Fowlkes, a supremely versatile musician who’s probably best known for his work in John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards and the Jazz Passengers.

“Charlie and Curtis have played together a lot and are crazy about each other, so it made sense,’’ Goldberg said.

The band’s tangled skein of relationships traces back to Hunter and Amendola, who helped spark the Bay Area’s acid jazz scene in the mid-1990s. Amendola powered an early version of Hunter’s trio, and they collaborated in the Grammy-nominated funk ’n’ jazz combo T.J. Kirk. Go Home is their first new venture together in more than a decade.

“There’s a deep connection that Charlie and I have, and it keeps growing in interesting ways,’’ said Amendola, whose affinity for volatile guitarists has continued with Nels Cline (between Wilco gigs) and Tortoise’s Jeff Parker. “This particular context is so suited for us. There are so many angles to Ben’s music. He has definitely pulled things out of me that I didn’t know were there, and I think that goes for Charlie, too.’’

Amendola and Goldberg forged a powerful connection through Plays Monk, a collective trio that focuses on the music of Thelonious Monk. The group’s loose, organically conceived arrangements of Monk’s ingenious compositions played an important role in Goldberg’s engagement with straight-ahead jazz.

“Plays Monk was the first time I put out a record that sounded like jazz, or wasn’t trying to be something besides jazz,’’ Goldberg said, referring to the trio’s self-named 2007 album. “That was a big step for me.’’

Raised in Denver, Goldberg joined the Bay Area’s flourishing klezmer revival movement in the mid 1980s with the tradition-minded band Klezmorim. The experience thoroughly grounded him in the nuances of Eastern European Jewry’s celebratory secular music, but the band’s literal re-creation of classic recordings began to feel stifling.

He sought release with bassist Dan Seamans and drummer Kenny Wollesen, musical compatriots with whom he’d been playing free jazz. When they applied a go-for-broke improvisational approach to a traditional klezmer tune, Goldberg experienced an epiphany, and the New Klezmer Trio was born (the group recently released a new album, “Speech Communication,’’ on Zorn’s Tzadik label).

“It was just one of those transformative experiences,’’ Goldberg said. “It may have been the first time in my life when I just felt this spiritual transformation through music, so I knew we were on to something.’’

In much the same way that the New Klezmer Trio reimagined Ashkenazi music, Goldberg and Wollesen deconstructed bebop with Junk Genius, a heady quartet that recorded a self-named album for Knitting Factory Works in 1995.

The band’s follow-up album, 1999’s “Ghost of Electricity’’ on Songlines, was moody and expansive, inspired by the spooky blues and old-time music of Roscoe Holcomb, Doc Boggs, Charley Patton, and Robert Johnson.

“When you get down to it, there’s as much wisdom in the best mountain music or blues as the great pop and jazz tunes that form the basis of the jazz repertoire,’’ Goldberg said.

Go Home’s elemental power flows from the same insight, as the band creates music that is cozy and spacious, pungent and perfumed, virtuosic, sophisticated and pleasingly raw.