Until this past week I really wasn't familiar with the music of Christopher Adler, a young San Diego-based composer/performer, but his Tzadik debut, Epilogue for a Dark Day, offers many reasons why we all should be. Ignore the gloomy title, for the most part this music is filled with vibrant energy and sunshine. Adler's instrument of choice is the khaen, a Laotian polyphonic mouth organ made from bamboo which predates the Western free-reed harmonica by a thousand years and that in various incarnations appears in Chinese folk music (as the sheng) and even in courtly Japanese gagaku (as the metal sho). The traditional music of the Lao (who populate Laos as well as much of Northern Thailand) is exciting and visceral and has a great deal in common with the post-minimalist music of many younger American composers making it an ideal departure point for Adler's muse.

The CD offers two solo khaen works which are both dead ringers for traditional pieces: The Wind Blown Inside (1997), and the title track Epilogue for a Dark Day (2001), which, given its year of composition, is perhaps a reference to 9/11 (the brief program notes don't mention this). There are also two very effective works in which Adler's axe interacts with Western instruments. In Three Lai (1997), the bowing of a violin and viola prove themselves to be a wonderful foil to the in and out breathing technique of khaen performance. In Pan-Lom (1998), Adler casts the net even wider incorporating, among other sonorities, a soprano sax, an oboe, a string trio, other Southeast Asian traditional instruments and a sampler.

As much as I really appreciate these wonderfully idiomatic cross-cultural encounters, however, my favorite piece on the CD may very well be Signals Intelligence (2002), which is also the most composition included here. Although the khaen is not featured in the score, South Asian traditions are not far behind in this relentless percussion ensemble composition which conjures up Balinese gamelan and the lesser-known metallophone musics of Thailand and Cambodia. Plus, it's great to finally have a recording of Steve Schick's fantastic percussion group red fish blue fish!