The saxophonist Miguel Zenón came from Puerto Rico to Boston to study at the Berklee College of Music in 1996, and fast emerged as a major creative voice in jazz, with a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2008 to attest to it. In his young but prolific career, he has made Puerto Rico one of his work’s running themes, exploring in several recent albums, with his quartet, its classic song canon and folkways.

With his new project, which he brings to NEC’s Jordan Hall Friday, Zenón follows this logic but takes a new tack, shifting his focus from the island itself to those who left it to come work in the United States, and their descendants. In the multimedia performance “Identities Are Changeable: Tales from the Diaspora,” he takes on a question that has fascinated him ever since his own move to the mainland.

“The first time I moved here,” says Zenón, who now lives in northern Manhattan, “it quickly became evident to me that people of Puerto Rican descent in the United States were different – that they weren’t ‘regular’ Puerto Ricans, like in Puerto Rico.”

“There was something there, something equal to us but different too. This sense of pride in being Puerto Rican jumped out at me. People identified with Puerto Rico even though a lot of them hadn’t been to Puerto Rico, or didn’t speak Spanish.”

“It’s a project about Puerto Rico even though it’s not Puerto Rican music,” Zenón says. Instead, the quartet, together with a large horn ensemble (which at tonight’s show will feature NEC students), develops new compositions by Zenón that interact with the interview footage and additional video creations by the artist David Dempewolf.

The project premiered at Montclair State College in New Jersey last year; tonight is only its third-ever performance. Each of its segments explores a recurring topic that the interviews revealed: the question of language, for example, or the tensions and bonds between Puerto Ricans and African-Americans in daily life and political struggle.

“I asked the same basic question: ‘What does it mean for you to be Puerto Rican?’ ” Zenón says. “They went into language, culture, being more attached to Puerto Rico than New York or vice versa. And what was most interesting and surprising to me was how much the answers were varied. I had a general vision of what a Nuyorican would be, but this was something richer.”

In writing music to complement these testimonies, Zenón followed a core principle. He rendered the idea of dual and shifting identities by layering two rhythms in each section.

“I created these metric patterns that are pretty different but coexist with each other,” he says. “There’s a pattern with five beats and a pattern with seven beats, going back and forth. Sometimes you feel the five a little stronger, sometimes the seven.”

Each of the six main compositions in the performance contrasts two rhythms in this way, Zenón says. He wrote the music first for his quartet, then orchestrated it for the large ensemble – his first time writing for a big band, he says, since college assignments.

For the video art, with its stark, abstracted treatments of urban landscapes, Zenón turned to Dempewolf on the recommendation of pianist Jason Moran. Dempewolf, who previously created the video components of Moran’s multimedia project on Thelonious Monk, “In My Mind,” came up with a unique approach for Zenón’s piece.

“I asked him to gather a list from the interviewees of places that had a good deal of psycho-geographic influence on them, and send me an address,” Dempewolf says. “I went to all of them – these little field trips around Manhattan and the Bronx – and found textures from all these places.”

“I wanted to pull it away from the expected, not do music-video clichés. I shot in the fall and winter. The video performs the tension that the interviewees talk about, through the architecture of the city, the look of a hard New York winter.”

Zenón teaches at NEC, and he says he’s excited to conduct several of his students in the large ensemble for tonight’s show. As for his interviewees, they won’t have the chance to see the project until it gets its first New York City date later this year. Zenón hopes to record the project as an album, but the logistics haven’t worked out yet.

But he’s thrilled to be making work that stretches his own boundaries into large-ensemble and multimedia while treating questions about Puerto Rican identity – of the diaspora, and ultimately his own – that have gnawed at him for many years.

“I was thinking about this idea and basically waiting for the right opportunity,” he says. “When I got home after the premiere and realized we’d made it, it was beyond happiness.”

The singer José James grew up in Minneapolis and studied jazz in New York, but he’s made his career mostly out of the American mainstream eye: recording for overseas and indie labels, living a few years in London, working with recherché producers like Gilles Peterson and Flying Lotus.

His recordings, spanning jazz and soul on a spectrum that stretches from Nat King Cole to J. Dilla, have earned him a cadre of committed fans on both sides of the Atlantic but no breakout commercial success — not least because his work has not fit neatly into any of the genre designations that regiment the US music industry.

Now, however, a new synthesis of jazz and soul, driven by musicians shaped by hip-hop and myriad other influences, is under way, and James, who is 35 and now lives in Brooklyn, finds himself in the center of it.

Out this week, his fourth album, “No Beginning No End,” marks his return to home turf with panache. Signed to the hallowed Blue Note label, he’s appeared on the Conan O’Brien and David Letterman shows, and launched an album-release tour that comes to Scullers on Saturday.

Two guest vocalists further stretch an already expansive field: singer-songwriter Emily King, who duets with James in a sweet, earnest pairing that evokes Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack; and Moroccan singer Hindi Zahra, who joins James on a taut, club-ready track built around a Gnawa rhythm and Afrobeat horns.

James navigates this profusion of sounds and ideas with the deftness and composure of one at peace with his eclecticism. His songs are smooth and spacious, the lyrics contemplative and romantic, delivered in a conversational, unhurried baritone. It makes for an album that’s a sleek hybrid, inevitably full of cascading references — Andy Bey here, D’Angelo there — but with its own secure identity.

“It’s been a long time in the making,” James says. He honed his approach with a pair of records, “The Dreamer” in 2008 and “Blackmagic” in 2010, that earned notice for their blend of jazz, R&B, and electronica. But he was taking on traditional jazz projects as well. He worked with respected elders Chico Hamilton and Junior Mance, and in 2010 recorded an album of standards, “For All We Know,” with Belgian pianist Jef Neve.

That year, he got the call for a particularly prestigious project — joining in a re-creation of a classic, the self-titled duo album of John Coltrane and singer Johnny Hartman, led by pianist McCoy Tyner, who played on the original 1963 date.

“To be able to stand onstage next to McCoy, to feel that presence, is something that will never be taken away from me,” James says. “People like that, they just inhabit the music — it’s really Zen.”

“But on a related note, working with him, with Chico Hamilton or Junior Mance, it showed me that jazz as we know it is really that generation’s language. It’s almost like trying to speak in an accent and dialect that’s older. That, more than anything, made me want to make my own stuff.”

If there’s a reference period that now inspires James more than any other, it’s no longer the time of standards and the Great American Songbook, but instead the early 1970s, not just for the exceptional profusion of music that it produced but for the sense of exploration and freedom to cross borders.

“That was a really exciting time for music in America,” James says. “You could hear Roberta Flack singing Leonard Cohen, and Laura Nyro singing black music. And it was all authentic, not forced.”

James says his all-time favorite album is Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You,” an idiosyncratic masterpiece that was not fully appreciated in its time, and which Ware produced. Meeting Ware, he says, was an inspiration on multiple levels.

“He’s a master to me. He’s done it all. He and Marvin came from that jazz and church background. And coming from Motown, they had a whole roomful of musicians on call.” For his new record James emulated that model, with a larger group of musicians and more sophisticated production than had occurred on his previous projects.

Like Glasper’s “Black Radio,” last year, also on Blue Note, “No Beginning No End” documents an emerging crossover scene whose aesthetic has yet to receive a name, but whose presence is palpable — through the involvement of influential figures like Yasiin Bey and Questlove of the Roots, on the pages of blogs like The Revivalist, and in the young, hip, mixed crowds turning up for shows, in lieu of the more staid, stereotypical “jazz audience.”

“There’s definitely a movement afoot of these cats,” says Don Was, the veteran musician turned Blue Note label president, who signed James. “It’s very much in the jazz tradition of having roots that run very deep, but being of the moment and aiming to the future. If you go to the underlying aesthetic it’s not that different from what Herbie [Hancock] and Wayne [Shorter] were doing in the 1960s and 1970s.”

James, too, believes that jazz and soul have come into a creative, progressive moment. But his immediate reward is to be able, finally, to present his work to the audience that matters to him the most.

“I’ve played in Italy since 2007, but I’ve never played Philly,” he says. “I’ve never played Atlanta. That was a thorn in my side with living abroad. I’m American. I want to work for my crowd and my generation. I’m going to be touring like crazy this year and the next.”

There’s only ever been a scant few acknowledged masters of the Hammond B-3 organ in jazz at any given time. So few, in fact, that when one leaves the scene — as in 2005, when the great Jimmy Smith passed away — aficionados have been left to wonder whether the instrument has a future in jazz at all.

That questioning has nothing to do with a lack of players, of course. Invented in the 1930s and marketed to churches, where it offered a portable, affordable alternative to the grand wind organs, the Hammond is played with joy and reverence across the land on Sundays. And in jazz, its shaky spot in the canon reflects decisions by record companies over the years — for instance in the 1970s, when organ-led records were lumped under the rubric “soul-jazz” — more than any dearth of creative players, then or now.

“Record companies pigeonholed them. But let’s face it, guys are playing the organ,” says Joey DeFrancesco, perhaps the best known B-3 player in jazz today. “They still call them soul-jazz records. But isn’t all jazz soul?”

That evidence (from the “Is the Pope Catholic?” school of rhetorical query) has been career fuel for DeFrancesco, 41, who played as a teen in Miles Davis’s band, and later with John McLaughlin. In something of a passing of the torch, he recorded with Smith days before the latter died. On his records as a leader, DeFrancesco favors straight-ahead jazz with a warm embrace of core values: standards, ballads, the blues, swing.

It features the eminent guitarist Larry Coryell, the polymath known particularly for his contributions to fusion in the early 1970s, and the even more eminent drummer Jimmy Cobb, who played with Davis and John Coltrane in the late 1950s and is the last living player from the “Kind of Blue” recording.

This weekend’s dates and previous ones last year by the three men have been billed as a tribute to Smith and guitar great Wes Montgomery, who had a strong collaboration in the 1960s. But DeFrancesco cautions not to read too much into the concept, which he says was a promoter’s idea, not the artists’ intention.

“Everybody knows I’m very influenced by Jimmy Smith,” DeFrancesco says. “He’s very much the creator of the style that I play in. And of course Wes Montgomery influenced a lot of stuff that Larry has done, and Jimmy played with Wes. But with this lineup, these guys in the group — we’re just three guys who wanted to play together and are interested in similar things.”

Those interests shine forth on “Wonderful! Wonderful!,” the album the trio made last year, and that provides much of the material for their live gigs. It features songs associated with Johnny Mathis (the title track), Sonny Rollins (“Wagon Wheels”), Benny Golson (“Five Spot After Dark”) and Duke Ellington (“Solitude”).

There’s also a Coryell tune named for DeFrancesco, “Joey D,” and an expansive blues number titled “JLJ” after the artists’ initials, and that serves a vigorous group signature and album finale. And on the standard “Old Folks,” DeFrancesco switches to trumpet and plays in a muted, melancholy vein that’s frank in its evocation of Davis.

History hovers over this date in more than one way. The trio recorded in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey, which hosted rafts of important Prestige and Blue Note sessions in the 1950s and 1960s, on the studio’s original instruments.

And there’s the generational exchange, of course, in which DeFrancesco sought out the two elder players and proposed a program of songs that mostly predate his birth.

“I love these guys,” DeFrancesco says. “I’ve always been a big believer in tipping your hat to the legends of the music, and wanting to do projects with them. They still have a lot to talk about on their instruments.”

Cobb, still a prolific performer at 83, returns the compliment. “Joey is a young boy with an old mind,” Cobb says. “He likes all of the stuff from the old days — he’s very back in there, and he plays as good as they did.”

Yet for all the history, what makes this collaboration click is the immediacy of the music itself — an enduring trait that the Hammond organ fosters, and that DeFrancesco attributes to the instrument’s church roots and working-class setting.

“It was always a blue-collar worker’s music,” he says. “People worked all day and at the end of the week, they wanted to feel good. That’s one of the reasons it’s played in the church. There’s something about the sound of the organ itself that makes people feel good.”

Ingrid Monson, a Harvard jazz scholar and ethnomusicologist with the lofty title of Quincy Jones Professor of African-American Music, owns a collection of balafons — the West African instrument that looks like an oversized, rustic xylophone, with gourds fixed under the wooden keys to supply resonance. They come from her research trips to Mali, where the balafon has a long history as a traditional music mainstay.

Her choice of balafon, however, is one that jelis, or griots — the hereditary musician caste closely associated with Malian tradition — do not favor. Their balafon, the one of the great medieval Mande empire and its heirs, is built on a heptatonic (7-note) scale. Monson’s are of the humble pentatonic (5-note) variety, a country cousin long scorned in Mali’s cultural elite.

That has changed now — thanks in large part to Neba Solo, a player who has brought respect to the rural balafon of his Senufo ethnic group, and also innovated, building balafons with added keys for bass parts and inventing new tunings to interact with a host of modern instruments.

Solo is a singer as well, unusual for a balafon player. His group, with his brother playing a treble balafon beside him, plus percussionists and dancers, is perfectly poised at the proverbial intersection of tradition and modernity. It makes sense deep in the Senufo countryside with its villages of mud huts and age-old ritual life, and also in the concert halls or at society weddings in Bamako, the fast-growing national capital.

“Mali is a place that is full of people like him!” says Monson. “But for want of management, or business sensibility, they aren’t heard on the major world stage.”

On Monday, Solo, accompanied by his brother and a percussionist, gives a rare concert at Harvard’s Radcliffe Gymnasium. Preceding it is a talk by Monson, who has worked with Solo for many years. She studied balafon with him for six months in 2005, in the provincial town of Sikasso where he lives, and accompanied the band as they played all over Mali. Her balafons are all his hand-crafted creations.

They have also done many hours of interviews — about Solo’s career, Senufo culture, the balafon, and more, all leading to a book that Monson is now completing, and that she will preview in her talk.

“It’s partly about the music,” Monson says, “and partly about what it means to be a rural Malian with no education, and become a person who modernizes a tradition.”

On the phone from Sikasso, Solo says working with Monson — who basically turned up in his world out of the blue a decade ago — has been a galvanizing experience.

“When I see someone who takes the trouble to come from so far away to conduct research on our music, it encourages me in my own work,” Solo says. “Especially when you speak about Harvard, and its reputation. It gives me strength to continue.”

“And it has brought me a lot of knowledge as well,” he adds. A trumpet player and scholar of jazz and other genres in their social context, Monson was no ordinary student. “She came to learn balafon and research Senufo music and Senufo life itself,” Solo says. “To understand the balafon and its place in daily life.”

That place is, in a word, central. “The balafon is always there,” Solo says. “It’s at baptisms, it’s at weddings.” A folk instrument at root, it appears at any Senufo festivity. “Village playing is not like a formal concert,” Solo says. “In the village people dance any way they want. You can change things around, it’s always a party.”

As modern Malian music took shape after independence, influenced by jazz, rumba, and rock, it took time for the balafon and other traditional instruments like the kora and ngoni to be readmitted to urbane respectability — with the pentatonic balafon at an added disadvantage.

Indeed, Solo credits his own inspiration to a reggae epiphany — the time in his late teens when he heard Alpha Blondy’s song “Jerusalem,” and wondered why the balafon couldn’t play a similar bass line.

“I asked my father for permission to make a new balafon, tuned the way I wanted,” Solo says. “But with respect for the balafon, because we can’t let go of what we’ve achieved already.” Permission was granted, and the rest is history — or will be, so long as recordings circulate and projects like Monson’s help document the work.

Today, Malian artists face new problems as the country is in crisis, recovering from a coup while its northern half is occupied by violent Salafi groups that deem music, and much else, impure. The Senufo region is away from the war zone, but the volatile situation affects everyone. As Solo says: “The elephant is big, but if he hurts his foot, his whole body feels pain.”

For Monson, who had to cancel a trip to Mali last summer due to the conflict, watching this crisis unfold, and seeing her friend weather it, offers bittersweet insight.

“As an ethnomusicologist you go and do the work, the place looks peaceful and wonderful, and then it falls like a house of cards,” she says. “But here’s this person on e-mail, teaching himself GarageBand . . . all these parts of modernity are there too.”

One is a glamorous, worldly vocalist who’s as brilliant a dancer and drummer as she is a singer. Another is a songwriter on the rise who’s concerned with the environment and social uplift. The third is the former bass player for a world-renowned funk band.

All three — Dobet Gnahoré, Kareyce Fotso, and Manou Gallo — are African women: Gnahoré and Gallo from the Ivory Coast, and Fotso from Cameroon. Though less known on this side of the Atlantic, they’ve each forged strong solo careers and a fan base, particularly in Europe. But this year the three have joined forces in a kind of supergroup, for maximum exposure and impact, and as a chance to experiment.

They bring the project, titled Afropean Women, to the Somerville Theatre tonight.

Musically, it’s a hybrid of hybrids, as none of the three is a narrow traditionalist. Gnahoré’s sound is as cosmopolitan as her home city, the Ivorian metropolis Abidjan, a business and arts crossroads of West Africa, while grounded in the folk experimentalism of the Village Ki-Yi, a local arts collective in which her father was a percussionist.

And Gallo, who at 40 calls herself the “vieille mère” (old mother) of the three, is a lifelong stage pro who was a youth player in 1980s Ivorian pop band Woya, then spent time in Village Ki-Yi, before moving to Europe and a six-year stint as the bass player in global funk act Zap Mama, which unleashed her rock and jazz sensibilities.

Their influences are disparate, says Fotso, but they had no trouble finding common ground for their collaboration.

“Ultimately all three of us come from Africa,” Fotso says. “We have plenty of cultural differences but there’s always a terrain where we meet. It’s in the rhythms, the intonations. You could really feel the motivation from each one of us as we started to work together.”

The collaboration — prompted by Belgian label Contre Jour as part of its Acoustic Africa series — is a recent one. It began with a work session in Brussels last January, and continued with rehearsals in Lomé, Togo, and a first series of concerts in Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Mali. Balafon master Aly Keita and New York-based guitarist Leni Stern, a veteran of numerous African collaborations, joined in and are part of the tour.

Each player contributed several songs, submitting them to a workshop process in which they took new shapes, as each musician added her ideas and her touch.

“They are all existing songs,” says Gnahoré. “We worked on them together, adapted them, and that way, we added some magic.”

The original instrumentation, the role-switching as each woman takes a turn on percussion, and the shared vocal lead duties make this a group unlike any other. They have yet to record, but video from their African concerts shows the women in a fluid, groovy exchange, their enthusiasm evident.

“We all appreciate each other,” Gnahoré says. “The show is dynamic and busy.”

The opportunity to create as a team of women was a significant motivation to get involved, says Gallo, a trailblazer in her own right as one of very few African women bassists on the scene.

“I don’t think of myself as a feminist, but I have a little feminist side,” Gallo says. “I enjoy being able to show how African women take charge of themselves.”

And though the show’s emphasis is performance, not politics, Fotso says she selected songs with a message as her contribution to the project. One denounces forced marriages that not only betroth teenage girls to men they do not choose, but also prematurely end their schooling.

Another addresses youth who, in many African countries just as in Europe and the Arab world, have taken to the streets to protest the high cost of living and lack of jobs. “I agree with the demands but not with destroying things,” Fotso says. “So I’m telling them, I understand your anger, but let’s remember it’s our country.”

Her third song has an environmental message. “We’re experiencing climate change in Cameroon. The seasons have lost their regularity, due to deforestation. I’m trying to draw attention to this looming disaster.”

Fotso still lives, happily, in Yaoundé, Cameroon, while Gnahoré and Gallo have been based in Europe for over a decade. The “Afropean women” label given their project has a different but real meaning for each of the three.

“We’re Africans who live in Europe, so by the force of things our music is mixed,” says Gnahoré. For Fotso, the distinction between Africa and Europe is fading, as globalization and shared cultural references make it possible to keep a foot in each place. “No one is pure anymore,” Fotso says. “We’re open and combined.”

Gallo embraces the “Afropean” identity wholeheartedly.

“My own music is very inspired by rock and jazz, but the African woman that I am is always within me,” she says. “So it’s a term that corresponds perfectly to my vision of who I am. I have these two sides, I have projects in all different places. We’re all nomads, in some way.”

NEW YORK — Let’s be real: There’s been queerness in hip-hop for ages.

There’s the homo-thug underground; the bawdy drag of New Orleans sissy bounce. Videos full of imagery that overflows their ostensibly heterosexual frame; the disclaimer “no homo,” with its protest-too-much reek. Just last week, a Harvard conference on “Queerness of Hip-Hop” gathered a slate of top cultural critics.

With sex and gender variation just one YouTube click away, the search for the mysterious gay rapper, and fervent denial in some circles that such a creature exists, has a ring of absurdity.

“There are so many of us,” says Le1f. “You read articles where they ask Nicki Minaj if we’ll ever see a gay rapper, and she’s not saying that she already knows 20. Come on!”

He’s also Senegalese on one side (where he gets his real name, Khalif Diouf), Gullah and Cherokee on the other, and an Upper West Side kid who boarded at Concord Academy and got a dance degree at Wesleyan University.

Le1f belongs to a fresh wave of queer artists who aren’t so much a movement in themselves as they are increasingly blended into New York’s fluid hip-hop scene. These days, uptown stars like A$AP Rocky have renounced homophobia, and straight and gay partiers mix at club nights like Ghe2o Goth1k, run by queer Latina DJ Venus X.

“People are out there in the open,” says Himanshu Suri of hip-hop trio Das Racist. “Gay black rappers, college-educated rappers, Indian rappers, Russian rappers. . .” Signed to Suri’s label Greedhead, Le1f opens for Das Racist on Oct. 1 at Royale, alongside roster mates Lakutis and SAFE.

A recent afternoon finds Le1f at a back table in a Greenwich Village bistro, nibbling at a salad, enjoying some quiet after the frenzy of Fashion Week, where he deejayed seven runway shows and afterparties.

He says he liked what he saw: “There’s a lot of things that I’d totally like to borrow. Really crazy gelatinous coats. Intricate dip-dyed linen jumpsuits. Caps that look like someone decapitated a praying mantis.”

On this day, he’s dressed down in slacks and a T-shirt, the blue crest in his hair mostly faded. He says he’s considering his next look. His second mixtape will be called “Tree House,” inspired by forest canopies, and he’s been checking out camouflage gear. “But it might be tacky to do foliage in the fall,” he says.

A rapper, producer, and serious dancer — he started ballet at age 4, and chose Concord Academy for its famous dance program — Le1f is also a fashionista, a club kid, and, says Suri, an all-around embodiment of today’s New York scene.

“He’s five years younger than me, but he’s the dude I’m always turning to to see what’s cool,” Suri says.

The two go back to the time when a teenaged Le1f was making tracks with Suri’s roommate and sleeping on their couch. Suri was compelled by Le1f’s music — “this aquatic, underwater trap stuff,” Suri calls it — and asked for some beats.

One became the track for Das Racist’s 2008 breakout, the goofy ear-worm “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” It features samples from gay-identified vogue house. “I was trying to be sneaky,” Le1f says.

Back then Le1f wasn’t rapping much. Now he’s in full voice, with lyrics and stage presence to match his beats.

On “Dark York,” the palette is mostly somber, full of woozy, gurgly effects, but enlivened by chimes, synths, and thick, driving beats. About half are self-produced; the balance come from future-bass mavens like Nguzunguzu and Matt Shadetek.

The lyrics have some of the gonzo intellectualism Das Racist fans will recognize, splicing in references to Scientology or Chinua Achebe. But Le1f’s work is less jagged and a lot more sexy. It’s rich with a distinct vocabulary: He’s banjee, mixy and wavy; he jukes, twerks, and calls out to twinks.

An admirer of Björk and Meredith Monk, Le1f enjoys manipulating his voice to visceral effect. One song features guttural sounds inspired by Inuit throat singing. “My voice has a lot of range,” he says. “I like to use it like a synth.”

“I might have to take serious singing lessons,” he adds. “I might have to go a crazy route, maybe total griot like Baaba Maal.”

Though his Senegalese father has long been out of the picture, Le1f drops enough references to Senegal, Islam, or African writers into lyrics and conversation to convey that those roots fascinate him.

“I feel like my affinity for juke and 150 bpm music is inspired by sabar,” he says, referring to the Senegalese dance and drum style.

He hopes to visit someday: “I should do it sooner than later, because the more people know I’m a gay rapper, the less likely it is.”

Not that Le1f would ever conceal himself. On the “Wut” video, he struts dance moves in short shorts and luxuriates on the lap of a buff, shirtless white guy who wears a Pikachu mask.

When the video went up on popular portal Worldstarhiphop.com, it prompted a torrent of homophobic vitriol. That was part of the plan, Le1f says.

“It’s cool that I get picked up by the foreign blogs, but at the same time those aren’t my people,” he says. “I’m still a black person from New York. So I wanted to troll the underbelly of black media because I knew that’s the only way up.”

He shrugs off the invective: “Whatever. It’s the Internet.” Exposure brings bigger prizes — not just gigs, which he says have doubled since “Wut,” but human rewards.

“I have a lot of black girl fans now,” he says. “And I have people DM me and say, ‘Thank you so much, I just came out to my family, I’m a rapper, can we talk?’ And that’s really cool for me.”

“We believe that we are completely, straightforwardly a jazz band,” says bassist Matthew “Moppa” Elliott. “With no qualifications at all.”

Why is this a question? Well, listen to any of the four studio albums by Elliott’s genius group with the oddball name Mostly Other People Do the Killing, or witness its kinetic, eccentric stage show, and you’ll understand why, in the nine years this New York quartet has plied its craft, queries have arisen.

Are they mad archivists, omnivorous consumers of riffs from swing, bebop, avant-garde, 1980s funk, classic rock, smooth jazz, and more, with a propensity to regurgitate these contents at unexpected moments and in strange ways?

Are they attention-deficit virtuosos of the avant-garde who get their kicks from the honks, squawks, or drones that ensue when, for example, trumpeter Peter Evans and saxophonist Jon Irabagon depart on a digressive duet that feels like two bulls with horns interlocked in struggle?

Answers are best found live, as on Sept. 27, when MOPDTK plays the Institute of Contemporary Art, on a hip double bill with avant-garde guitarist Marc Ribot. But Elliott, who composes most of MOPDTK’s songs and might be considered the band leader — if only they believed in leaders — offers clues to the method behind the madness.

“You need both,” Elliott says, referring to jazz repertoire and the daring, no-boundaries experimental music that are usually presented in opposition. “Someone needs to be playing Duke Ellington tunes, straight up. And we also need people not doing it. Neither one is more important than the other.

“The form our insurrection takes is we’re just trying to provide this alternate view of the whole situation, where you don’t need to worry about reverence and irreverence. Everything is fair game and everything is portrayed in a positive light.”

Exhibit A is, well, pretty much any MOPDTK song — “Blue Ball,” for example, on the 2010 album “Forty Fort” (both places in Pennsylvania, Elliott’s home state). It contains bits of bossa nova, New Orleans, way-out group improvisation, and a lusty reprise of the chorus from Sheena Easton’s “Strut.”

Exhibit B is the stage performance, where any boundaries still left standing fall away, Elliott says.

“When we play live, two or three songs could be happening simultaneously. Or we could stop in the middle of one song and go straight into another. The tunes from our studio albums have become the book; we can jump in and out of them quickly. It’s like a kaleidoscope: It could be fragmented or unified, and change in the span of two or three seconds.”

To pull this off entails meeting a few requirements. First, of course, is virtuoso command of a massive repertoire of music and ideas, and the creative curiosity to sustain it. Second is an extreme level of trust and comfort with one’s bandmates. MOPDTK, who don’t take a gig if all four players can’t make it, have this kind of entente.

“Any one of the four of us can literally do anything we want, whenever we want,” Elliott says. “If any one of us goes off on a tangent, it’s fine. We know that whatever the outcome is, we have ways of bailing each other out — or not. We’re comfortable.”

Just as important to MOPDTK’s effectiveness is that as brainy as their process is, their performance is joyous and their music is accessible. There’s no obligation to pick up on the references. And there are plenty of swinging, melodic passages, without which, Elliott says, the excursions into weirdness would lose their point.

“It wouldn’t work if we were just playing complete chaos all the time,” he says. “It’s the fact that out of chaos it’s suddenly some crisp 4/4 swing for 30 seconds, then it’s gone — the contrasts are what make it interesting, hopefully for the audience, too.”

MOPDTK gets its name from a quote attributed to Leon Theremin, inventor of the early electronic instrument that bears his name, and a survivor of the Soviet gulag. He is said to have exonerated Stalin because “mostly other people did the killing.” “That was the darkest thing I’d ever heard,” Elliott says, and therefore a good band name.

But the name reads just as well as an inside joke about jazz’s many sub-streams that unite in the timeworn expression of high praise for a show, album, or solo: “That was killin’!”

At the ICA show, Elliott says MOPDTK will partly try out new material that draws on yet another territory: the much derided fare known as smooth jazz. The band has been beefing up on Grover Washington Jr., David Sanborn, and other smooth-jazz icons, in the belief that they, too, have expanded the jazz language in ways that all the synth-heavy production of the time hurt, but didn’t kill.

“What’s interesting is all the weird scoops and swells and turns in smooth jazz,” Elliott says. “As an ensemble, we’re delving into that stuff. It ended up generating what for us was very useful, in that our new tunes don’t sound anything like the tunes that we already have in our book.

“And so it opens up new territory that we can spontaneously invade.”

NEW YORK — The trumpeter Christian Scott terms “stretch music” the big, open-minded sound that he seeks, for his own band and for jazz in general.

On his brand-new album, “Christian aTunde Adjuah,” Scott stretches more than just rhythmic and harmonic conventions. The album itself is a sprawling double CD, 23 tracks long. Even Scott’s name has grown longer: the New Orleans native is now Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, a “completion,” as he puts it, that honors his ultimate African ancestry.

At 29 and with eight albums as a leader, Scott, who plays Scullers Friday, has not been shy with compositions and ideas. “Christian aTunde Adjuah,” though, presents as a uniquely personal statement — and not just by its length, title, or cover art, which features Scott in the regalia of a Black Indian, the New Orleans ritual tradition in which he grew up.

“I wanted to show people who I am,” Scott said last week. “The music has been at a loss for perspectives and characters for some time.”

The downstairs venue, part of Ethiopian-Swedish chef Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster restaurant, was filling with a good-looking crowd: young, hip, vibrant, mostly black, the kind of audience that gives the lie to “jazz is dead” jeremiads.

Scott, who lives close by, is a regular at the spot; one song on the album is called “Red Rooster.” For the performance, though, he zoomed in on what he felt were some of the record’s centerpieces.

They included the elongated, elegiac “Danziger,” which commemorates a lethal police shooting and cover-up in New Orleans days after Hurricane Katrina. It showcased the quintet’s unique texture, in which sumptuous, searching guitar work by Matt Stevens offsets the keening tone Scott achieves on his hybrid horns, one of which is a combination of trumpet, flugelhorn, and cornet.

And on “New New Orleans,” the group’s new drummer, 22-year-old Joe Dyson, threw down a New Orleans bounce groove so vicious that it seemed only the classy surroundings prevented an outbreak of bounce’s butt-in-the-air dancing.

The omnivorous Scott has absorbed widely from hip-hop, European classical music, West African and Native American harmonies, and myriad other sources: Part of “stretch music,” he said, is developing a musical grammar and methods of improvisation that allow all these influences into jazz.

“Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music,” he said. “You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom! All the music that happened in the last 100 years was born out of that. Anyone who thinks something like that isn’t going to happen 100 years later is an idiot. Every form of music that you hear right now is a fusion.”

In New York, where every possible form of jazz experimentation and crossover coexists, Scott’s statement is uncontroversial. But his New Orleans roots and training — he came up playing in the city’s bars, and his uncle is the saxophonist Donald Harrison — make it, in that context, a political intervention.

Scott’s liner essay for the new album addresses his disagreements with the city’s guardians of tradition. His stance puts him at odds with the neoclassical approach of Wynton Marsalis. And he respectfully differs with Nicholas Payton, another New Orleans trumpet master, who rejects the term “jazz” in favor of “Black American Music.”

The cultural climate is one reason Scott lives in New York, despite lacing his music and titles with New Orleans vernacular and themes. Another is basic freedom and safety. “You can’t walk around the Upper Ninth Ward with the same liberalness that you walk around in Harlem,” he said. “Compared to where I grew up, this is utopia.”

Yet Scott, in some fundamental way, doesn’t like comfort. He grew up boxing, and he brings to the stage both the aggression and the underlying melancholy of a prizefight. He struggles, he said, every time the trumpet reaches his lips.

“I hate my instrument,” he said. “I hate the natural sound of the trumpet, but I think I’m naturally set up to be a trumpet player. I know that sounds weird. But pretty much anytime I play a note I’m uncomfortable in a general sense.”

That’s the reason he plays an array of unusual, hybrid horns. But from his odd relationship with his instrument, he gains a sense of creative imbalance that he finds productive — and indeed, tries to stoke in his bands.

“I might start cussing at them on the bandstand, get them to [mess] with each other,” he said. “If a guy’s in his comfort zone, he’s not really telling me what he feels musically about what we’re dealing with.”

To keep himself on his toes, Scott seeks musicians with whom he’s comfortable fighting — and increasingly, younger ones like Dyson, who know his body of work and are ready to do something new.

As a teenager in New Orleans, Scott said, he found that even the younger players were stuck in ancient sounds. They gave him no clear clues about the way forward. Coming into his own prime, he refuses to get caught in the same trap.

“We’re just priming the canvas so the next generation of guys don’t have any complaints,” he said. “Once I had the opportunity to do something, I was going to make sure to do something, so that [guys] coming behind me didn’t have any excuses as to why they couldn’t express themselves.”

The jazz guitarist Bill Frisell can play knotty, cerebral music with the best of the avant-garde, but being cryptic is not his stock in trade. He’s interested in the history and art of the song, the American folk tradition, roots music of different origins, and that makes much of his own work lyrical and in some emotional sense, familiar.

But while some music feels familiar in a vague way, other songs are so universal that they summon in the listener instantly recalled lyrics and a kaleidoscope of memories; songs freighted, even burdened, with meaning.

“All We Are Saying. . .”, Frisell’s latest album, devoted to the repertoire of John Lennon, and which he presents on Saturday with his quintet at the Newport Jazz Festival, boldly enters that complicated territory.

“Most of my albums have something somebody knows, a folk song, something recognizable,” says Frisell, 61. “But this music, almost every person on the planet has some kind of relationship with.”

The songs, divided evenly between songs Lennon wrote for the Beatles and ones from his later career, are indeed mostly global heritage items: “In My Life,” “Imagine,” and “Give Peace a Chance” are all there. Others are only slightly less famous, such as “Mother” or “#9 Dream.”

And rather than deconstruct them or use them as allusive source code for an analytical project, Frisell and his group, with violinist Jenny Scheinman sharing the front line, take the campfire approach: Play the songs as they exist, and see what happens.

“We didn’t try to take them apart,” Frisell says. “This band has a legacy of playing together, we’re best friends. We’re taking what we know of the songs and what they tell us to do, the same as if it was a Sam Cooke song, or Hank Williams.”

It’s in the delivery that the magic happens, of course. Frisell and band bring the full arsenal of their jazz, folk, and blues knowledge to these songs, opening them up or, as he says, peeling back layers.

“The songs are fantastic, there’s all kinds of stuff in there to draw from,” he says. “When we first did this, my standard line was that this music was always part of my life. In a way that’s a lie. I’d never spent time studying it the way I tried to learn a Thelonious Monk or Charlie Parker song. I’d never done that with these songs until now.”

The Lennon project brings Frisell to Newport’s main stage, but is not his only presence at the festival. He’ll also play with the smart, witty trio the Bad Plus later Saturday, and perform duets with Scheinman on Sunday.

When he meets up with the Bad Plus, another spirit will hover over the proceedings — that of the great drummer Paul Motian, who passed away last year. Frisell played in Motian’s trio, alongside saxman Joe Lovano, for three decades, and the much younger Ethan Iverson, the Bad Plus pianist, worked with Motian in recent years.

The passing of the torch, the learning across generations, the overlapping long-term collaborations, and one-off experimental side gigs are part of jazz’s history and its way of being. They are traits especially marked at a festival like Newport, where the programming is focused and rigorous, yet the atmosphere is familial and relaxed.

Frisell is a jazz road warrior and by now one of the music’s senior figures. But the chance to work in such a setting never gets old, he says. “It still kind of blows my mind that I get to do stuff like this.”

NEW YORK — A corner apartment in Harlem: air conditioning on high against the blazing heat outside, African art objects and concert posters on the walls, incense wafting through the living room.

This is the temporary command post of Diblo Dibala, Congolese bandleader and guitarist extraordinaire, as he readies for a one-month North American tour spreading the gospel of soukous, one of the most compelling and contagiously rump-shaking styles of music ever invented, yet one rarely performed in these parts nowadays.

Musicians stop by, make coffee, log on to the computer. Like many Congolese artists, Dibala, who founded iconic groups Loketo in the 1980s and Matchatcha in 1990, has long lived in Paris, where work conditions are vastly better than back home. But he has a parallel crew here, among New York’s large pool of African talent, who back him at his US shows, including Friday night at Boston’s Bastille Day party on Marlborough Street.

One is Ngouma Lokito, superstar bass player from another essential 1980s band, Soukous Stars, now based here. Others come from Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya. They include the female dancers without whose dexterous moves, heavily focused on hips and rear end, no self-respecting soukous show is complete.

This contrasts with Europe, where, he says, the economic doldrums have people withdrawing into their shell. Meanwhile the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he made his name as a guitar wizard in the 1970s, is prey to authoritarian rule in the capital, war in the east, poor infrastructure, and a corrupt atmosphere.

“Musicians back home are singing praises of governors and ministers just to get money,” Dibala says. “That isn’t real music!”

Most of all, soukous — in which songs open in rumba tempo, with lyrics in the elegant Lingala language, then accelerate and erupt into dazzling guitar polyrhythms in a section known as the sebene — is itself a victim of changing times.

Twenty years ago it was arguably the dominant African pop music, heard in bars and taxis from Abidjan to Nairobi, and in hip clubs frequented by Africans overseas. Many soukous players of that time are now scattered, often struggling. Younger artists de-emphasize the guitar in favor of bass, synths, and effects. Nigerian hip-hop, Angolan kuduro, Ivorian coupé-décalé are among the blunter new genres with continental sway.

“There aren’t as many people anymore who make soukous,” Dibala says. “And yet it’s one of the greatest styles of music Congo possesses.”

Dibala himself was one of the music’s innovators in his time. With Loketo in the early 1980s, he helped pioneer a style that abbreviated the slow rumba section that the great earlier bands, led by the likes of Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau, so relished.

The new style was to get quickly to the sebene — and keep accelerating. From their base in Paris, Loketo and others had less use for long Lingala lyrics that many in their audience wouldn’t understand. They reduced these and added more “animation” — calls and exhortations to hype the crowd higher and higher.

“I added my stone to the edifice,” Dibala says. “When I solo, it’s faster, higher notes — to touch people and make them dance.”

He’s not insensitive to new tastes: “You have to adapt to the time you live in,” he says. “We have some synths, for example. I change things up a little, but I remain myself. Without my guitar, it wouldn’t be me.”

He has also started playing some folk songs from his home region, Kasai, both in soukous versions and in traditional style.

A conversation with Dibala naturally turns to politics. The stagnation back home exasperates him, as does the endless war for resources in Africa’s Great Lakes region, which has engulfed eastern Congo in a spiral of conflict and atrocities.

Last year’s election that incumbent president Joseph Kabila won was widely seen as flawed. “It wasn’t even an election,” Dibala says. When change comes, he says, he would love to organize a big concert in Kinshasa featuring all the soukous diaspora.

Until then, he’ll keep playing overseas, sharing a sound that, for all its travails, never fails to prove its relevance where it counts: on the dance floor.

“Wherever we go, people acclaim us for this music,” Dibala says. “Soukous is still here.”