Hear­ing cham­ber music instru­ments in a more pop con­text is no acci­dent these days. It has a great deal to do with young musi­cians, brought up lis­ten­ing to pop music, train­ing at con­ser­va­to­ries and want­ing to make music that’s both chal­leng­ing and enjoy­able. Twenty years ago, a cello or clar­inet appear­ing on a pop record would have been a slightly pre­ten­tious orna­ment, nowa­days there is pop music being made exclu­sively with the cello.

Except it’s not quite pop music, it’s some­thing that can be iden­ti­fied as being truly new. It’s not an ide­ol­ogy but it cer­tainly is a move­ment, and again it’s being dri­ven by young, trained musi­cians who find that they love Brahms and Bowie. They grew up in a gen­er­a­tion that felt less of a need to seg­re­gate their tastes, and their tastes had them play­ing jazz and rock and orches­tral and cham­ber music, and singing. They also have lis­ten­ing habits based around that great genre lev­eler, iTunes, which trans­forms a music col­lec­tion into a data­base of styles that can be queried and inter­re­lated in good and con­struc­tive ways that many usu­ally per­cep­tive and sen­si­tive crit­ics are uncom­fort­able with.

What they pro­duce is music which hov­ers in the region of dif­fer­ent styl­is­tic compass-points, shift­ing its bal­ance and influ­ence towards the spaces between, sound­ing at times a bit more like new cham­ber music, a bit more like jazz, a bit more like rock, but never solely one of those styles. A real pio­neer who has done it as an inde­pen­dent artist is Zoe Keat­ing, who as a solo per­former uses the cello to make music that has rig­or­ous struc­ture and meth­ods, is grounded in clas­si­cal and new music tech­niques, and has the sonic and emo­tional imme­di­acy of rock. Now there are two new record­ings fea­tur­ing ultra-contemporary cello play­ing, on out and one upcom­ing, which express two very dif­fer­ent approaches to this idea Along with the cello, their com­mon threads are philo­soph­i­cal; they each push for­ward the pos­si­bil­i­ties of what can be done with this fun­da­men­tally catholic approach to style.

Out right now is “The Secret Lan­guage of Sub­ways” from Amy X. Neuburg and The Cello ChiX­tet, which is actu­ally a trio. This is a real album, music cre­ated for a live song-cycle. Lis­ten­ing to it is an intrigu­ing expe­ri­ence. The sen­sa­tion of a coher­ent set of songs, most of them in the first per­son, the cello accom­pa­ni­ment which ranges through a vari­ety of rich har­mony, coun­ter­point and propul­sive rhythms, is the expe­ri­ence of cabaret. That’s a tricky genre to define, but there are cer­tain things that it fea­tures; songs con­cern­ing per­sonal nar­ra­tives, a sense of the dra­matic in musi­cal style and per­for­mance, ele­ments of var­i­ous styles of pop­u­lar music, show music and clas­si­cal melded together with a sense of arti­fice (which may be sin­cere or ironic, or both). In the imag­i­na­tion, cabaret inhab­its a time­less space where peo­ple are sen­si­tive, sophis­ti­cated, cos­mopoli­tan, per­haps a bit more ele­gant, refined and wealthy than we are, vaguely lonely and, in the room and lis­ten­ing to the music, acknowl­edg­ing each other’s lone­li­ness. There is a self-consciousness in cabaret that con­nects it to these ongo­ing projects to make some­thing new out of musi­cians’ per­sonal ideas, and the idea of cabaret is a use­ful lens through which to dis­cover ways to appre­hend and appre­ci­ate these in-the-moment styles, even if the music itself is not intended for that milieu. A mer­cu­r­ial and won­der­ful exam­ple of this is Iva Bittova’s record­ing with the Bang On A Can All-Stars, a charm­ing and inde­scrib­able work that cre­ates a new and sat­is­fy­ing place in the imagination.

Neuburg’s record is very much cabaret and also very much a new thing. The songs have a nar­ra­tive com­plex­ity that goes beyond super­fi­cial slo­gans into per­sonal search­ing and (un)intentional con­fes­sion, the music works its way through styles, not only from song to song but within songs itself — a cabaret hall­mark — always pro­vid­ing accom­pa­ni­ment that fits the lyri­cal con­tent. Her singing has ele­ments of whis­per­ing del­i­cacy and dra­matic belt­ing, her har­monies empha­size mod­u­la­tion and her melodies empha­size inter­vals over the small up and down motion in most pop music.

There are knotty things going on here; the odd-meter, rock­ing pulse of ‘Some­one Else’s Sleep’ accom­pa­nies a sin­u­ous voice/cello duet that sounds South Indian; ‘Clos­ing Doors’ has ele­ments from Steve Reich’s “Tehillim,” and these are melodic ele­ments which makes it a deeply inter­est­ing aspect of that composer’s influ­ence on younger musi­cians; the record con­cludes with a con­fi­dent, accom­plished arrange­ment of Gen­e­sis’ ‘Back in NYC,’ which fits the lyri­cal and musi­cal qual­i­ties of the record (there is more than a lit­tle pro­gres­sive rock in the music that’s explor­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of these styles; pretty much any musi­cian who has enjoyed play­ing clas­si­cal, jazz and rock finds some­thing musi­cally appeal­ing and inspir­ing in the work of groups like Gen­e­sis, Yes and, yes, Rush).

These are ele­ments in how it works, but what does it do, exactly? It tells the story of a woman in a city, get­ting from sit­u­a­tion to sit­u­a­tion and from one emo­tional state and expe­ri­ence via the under­ground, which in the songs is both a phys­i­cal con­veyance and a way of think­ing and feel­ing, of dig­ging in and tun­nel­ing through out to the other side and, in this case, a sense of life. There is, like in Mahler and many clas­si­cal song-cycles, a delib­er­ate begin­ning in dark­ness and a grad­ual, com­plex, move­ment to some sense of light and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. While the Gen­e­sis tune serves as a send-them-out-the-doors epi­logue, Neuburg’s lyrics begin in the tub, with the trou­bles of a per­former (a self-referential qual­ity that is cabaret at its best), take us into the sub­way, into emo­tional tur­moil and con­flict, and, finally, into a con­tem­pla­tion of the messes around and inside us that are an inevitable part of liv­ing. There are moments of cir­cus humor and the best incor­po­ra­tion of ‘Chop­sticks’ I’ve ever heard intended seri­ously — and yes, it works. As a whole, it’s an involv­ing lis­ten. Between the book­ends, the songs will work to var­i­ous degrees with var­i­ous lis­ten­ers; they have so much spe­cific per­son­al­ity and don’t seek to please every imag­in­able lis­tener, but they are all well-crafted. But this is not a record that one will sam­ple, it’s one for lis­ten­ing all the way through, and that is a truly mov­ing expe­ri­ence, the emo­tional and musi­cal skein elic­it­ing a plan­gent response right in the gut and a catch in the throat. The book­end songs, ‘One Lie’ and ‘Shrap­nel,’ are daz­zling, exquis­ite and pow­er­ful, and I pre­dict they will be per­formed in front of well-dressed, smart, and vaguely, qui­etly lonely audi­ences in cabarets for years to come.

On Sep­tem­ber 15, you can buy “Ancient Star,” the debut record­ing from cellist-singer Jody Red­hage and her ensem­ble Fire In July. Her syn­the­sis of clas­si­cal, jazz, rock and pop is much more in the cham­ber music vein, with a heavy empha­size on jazz and impro­vi­sa­tion. Her excel­lent band fea­tures clar­inet, trum­pet, trom­bone, vibes, gui­tar, piano, bass, drums and per­cus­sion. While Neuburg is a dra­matic, force­ful singer able to move through dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­i­za­tions, Redhage’s pure-toned soprano is in the style of con­tem­po­rary Medieval-Renaissance vocal per­for­mance prac­tice. Her music has dif­fer­ent ideas about com­po­si­tion, style and per­for­mance, it’s a step away from the per­sonal drama of cabaret towards the slightly more abstract sense of indi­vid­ual pieces and songs, a con­cert rather than a salon per­for­mance. It cov­ers a broader styl­is­tic range as well; it’s made with more of a clas­si­cal sen­si­bil­ity, and jux­ta­poses sec­tions, plac­ing Medieval monophony against a march, a shuf­fle beat against a Dix­ieland idea of group impro­vi­sa­tion. Her lyri­cal mate­r­ial is an oppor­tu­nity mainly to use her voice as an addi­tional instru­ment and color in full-spectrum tex­tures. Along with her own songs, she sets four William Car­los Williams poems, with vary­ing results; ‘Ancient Star’ sup­ports the text with a grace­ful groove and soar­ing melody, while the well-known ‘This Is Just to Say,’ is a per­haps delib­er­ately awk­ward exer­cise in scan­ning, it stands out for tak­ing the wrong lessons from Charles Ives’ songs because so much else of the record flows both vocally and instru­men­tally. The pieces struc­ture pop grooves with the tech­niques of clas­si­cal cham­ber music (more prog-rock) legacy, and the band han­dles that jux­ta­po­si­tion with aplomb, firm in the rhythm, trans­par­ent in the inter­play and main­tain­ing a sup­ple line.

Her set­ting of Williams’ ‘The Boti­cel­lian Trees’ would fit on the pro­gram of any con­tem­po­rary music recital, and is played with that styl­is­tic under­stand­ing and sym­pa­thy. The band lays down a bass-line that would not be out of place on a Rush record on ‘Ele­va­tion,’ and plays a sup­ple tango on ‘I Won­der Why.’ As an ensem­ble, they develop quite a lot of musi­cal and emo­tional power, and there are real stand­out pas­sages, espe­cially an excel­lent vibes solo from Tim Collins on the con­clud­ing ‘Green­point Slide,’ and the entire ensem­ble on ‘Rum Point.’ They groove, rock, sing and shout. The gen­eral flaw is some stiff­ness in the leader; her singing is at times still caught in a clas­si­cal con­cep­tion of phras­ing and rhythm, when the music she is mak­ing clearly calls for some­thing else. But “Ancient Star” is a real accom­plish­ment, refresh­ing and enjoy­able, music that is explor­ing and pio­neer­ing a new style and doing so with real thought and skill.