**** Tin Hat Trio

HELIUM

(Angel)

It's not surprising to find that the San Francisco-based Tin Hat Trio have traveled in circles that include Bill Frisell, John Zorn, and the ROVA Saxophone Quartet. In their original compositions, the trio (guitarist Mark Orton, keyboardist Rob Burger, and string player Carla Kihlstedt) match instrumental virtuosity with formal invention to come up with an integrated whole. There are echoes of European fiddle music as filtered through Zorn; there's Frisell's off-kilter Americana, and a chamber group's empathic sensitivity to timing and dynamics. The mix-and-match instrumentation would read like a stunt if a tune like "Helium," for instance, weren't so rhythmically on (no dilettante could manage the kind of expressive articulation Burger gets from an accordion). And Kihlstedt's "Slip" accents a lovely Viennese café waltz with an unidentifiable recurring blip that gives the piece the sound of Morse code from a lost civilization. The group work similar effects with touches of blues and bluegrass, dobro and banjo, Piazzolla and Copland. It's a fully imagined musical world. For good measure, Tom Waits lends his vocals to a tune.

-- Jon Garelick

(Tin Hat Trio play the Milky Way this Monday, May 22. Call 524-3740.)