John Zorn's Simulacrum blast Johnny Brenda's with jazz-metal experimentation

Historically, Philly is an organ jazz town. But the likes of Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, and Shirley Scott never summoned a sound quite like John Zorn's Simulacrum. Throughout their hour-long set at Johnny Brenda's on Wednesday night, presented by Ars Nova Workshop, the trio fused the visceral and the virtuosic, stitching together prog-rock technique, heavy-metal brutality, and avant-jazz improvisation.

Despite his name on the marquee (and initial advertising that he'd be on hand to conduct), Zorn himself was nowhere to be seen. That's not necessarily a drawback, except to diehard fans. No one shows up for the Eroica expecting Beethoven to be in the room. He may have started his career as the most aggressive iconoclast in jazz, but Zorn has evolved into a staggeringly prolific, bewilderingly eclectic postmodern composer.

There was no mistaking Zorn's signature on Simulacrum's music on Wednesday. The trio displayed many of the hallmarks of his writing from the beginning: punishing force, breakneck shifts in tone and tempo, styles colliding with the abrupt violence of a car wreck. He stitches together genres into Frankensteinian creations, in this case grafting the riffs and blast beats of an extreme metal band onto the body of a jazz organ trio.

John Medeski, best known for the buoyant grooves he brings to his own well-known trio, Medeski Martin and Wood, and a variety of other jam-band-aligned projects, embraces the more sepulchral sounds of the Hammond organ in this project. Medeski has a long history in Zorn's various projects, and the composer takes full advantage of the keyboardist's wide-ranging skills. At Johnny Brenda's, Medeski took on the role of a shrieking vocalist one moment, a Keith Emerson-style prog synthesist the next. Over the hour-long set, he moved from 1960s psych-rock to sensitively developed soloing to mashing his fist on the keyboard to muster concrete slabs of sound.

Medeski's main foil in the trio is guitarist Matt Hollenberg, whose band Cleric is itself a ferocious blend of boundary-pushing metal and experimental composition. Hollenberg and Medeski fired off spiky, angular lines with hairpin precision before the guitarist broke off into blistering solos - or the piece broke down into bursts of explosive noise. The band is anchored by Kenny Grohowski, a young jazz-oriented drummer with a wealth of credits to his name. He impeccably navigated the music's 90-degree shifts from black metal thunder to intricate polyrhythms.