Last Thursday, the soft light of dusk lingered in the theatre at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, where floor-to-ceiling windows let you see the Boston Harbor from two sides. Yachts, Harbor Cruisers, and sailboats passed in the distance, backgrounded by the Logan airport control tower on one side and the Custom House clock tower on the other. In the middle of the room, on an oriental rug spread across the hardwood floor, a set of five instruments sat bunched.

The stage was set for jazz to return to the ICA.

Thursday night featured John Zorn and his compositions in the debut concert of "New Music Now," a series of jazz performances curated by musician-composers (and Zorn affiliates) Mark Feldman and Ned Rothenberg. The series marks the first serious effort to bring live jazz to the new ICA performance space, and, if the first pair of concerts is any indication, jazz fans have reason to be optimistic.

Feldman, a violinist who has played with everyone from Paul Bley to Loretta Lynn, had the lead-off spot Thursday, playing selections from Zorn's Malphas: Book of Angels. He played a duo with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, a young, slight woman whose slender figure belied the ferocity with which she can attack her instrument. She wore a black cardigan which amplified her unruly black hair, itself a frame for her impish face. Feldman, for his part, had dressed like a barber with an untucked blue shirt over black pants and a pair of wire framed glasses. (His haircut was immaculately precise.) He had the petulant coyness of a comedian in deadpan. The duo worked well together.

Their first piece was a case in point. The music sounded like the castoffs from a chase sequence in a Warner Bros. cartoon. And the collaboration itself felt like a cartoon. Courvoisier would begin to sculpt a distinctive melody when Feldman would interrupt, childishly, with a burst of violin and set a new course. (ICA director David Henry did say that John Zorn lacked an attention span.) Courvoisier would reluctantly, indulgently follow along. They played like friendly antagonists, at once enamored and annoyed by each other.

The traces of Jewish folk music so distinctive in Zorn's work were best heard in the duo's third piece. It was a wild pastiche that included passages of folk violin and snatches of Beethoven. As Feldman wove the mournful violin through a minor key dirge, Courvoisier tapped a repetitive rhythm on the piano, increasing the tension until Feldman's part deformed itself into a jagged, jazzy scale exercise. When it came time for her piano solo, Courvoisier wrangled notes with a stiff passion that recalled Muhal Richard Abrams.

Their penultimate piece, "Reguel," had the pair working in their closest sync. The piece is a spry melody, coherent and consonant. After the earlier, disjointed pieces, "Reguel" had the inevitable and familiar aimlessness of a spring stroll.

John Zorn's saxophone has an immediately identifiable tone. It's a husky, smoke drenched voice that carries in overtones alongside the notes he plays. He clenches the saxophone reed in his jaw like he's saying "fuck."

He played in a trio Thursday night, joined by Greg Cohen on bass and Kenny Wolleson on drums. They performed selections from Zorn's Masada songbook, and remained locked in a much jazzier mode than Feldman and Courvoisier had been. Zorn was impeccable, Cohen precise, but the real treat of the trio was Wolleson.

Dressed in white pants and a billowy white shirt, unshaved, his hair looking as if it had fallen out in clumps earlier in the day, Wolleson focused on one thing. His drums. He played with a peculiar hardness, not without its swing, that put him somewhere between Max Roach and Han Bennink. Indeed, he had the latter's sense of humor, infusing passages with rim shots that sounded like they were somehow backwards.

The trio's second piece showcased Wolleson's talent. It was a skronky number, filled with the starts and stops that make a drummer irreplaceable. The melody from the group's first piece still lingered in Zorn's alto, like a memory that you can't quite bring to the front of your mind. Eventually deformed beyond recognition, sheets of screeching saxophone, the melody found itself broken by reports of percussion until the trio settled into a funky jazzploration with shades of Archie Shepp. The piece ended with a careering skronk from Zorn's alto, a well deserved exclamation point.

By the fourth piece, a swinging syncopated number, half the crowd was bobbing its head. Cohen handled the bassline like a reformed member of a ska band while Wolleson provided slick Latin jazzy shots of emphasis that were as unexpected as they were effective.

The encore, of course, brought all five musicians together for an eerie piece that had Zorn playing somewhere between Klezmer and Blue Train. Courvoisier played inside the prepared piano, quietly relaxing into the performance as Feldman made his violin wail with sounds that mimicked the Doppler effect. The collaboration between Courvoisier and Feldman was so solid that they seemed to be a coherent duo haunting the quintet. They locked eyes at several points, Feldman reassuring Courvoisier, who seemed ill at ease with the other performers.

The duo came out for a second encore, without the other three. The final piece of the night was madly frantic, and it did not seem out of place for Courvoisier to quickly un-prepare her piano in the middle of playing. As the night ended, a handful of boats still floating across the harbor, Feldman made his coup de grâce: a vibrato that he held until it was almost an entirely new, complimentary cache of notes.

It was still ringing in Bostonist's ears when we walked into the cool saltiness of April's harbor breeze.

Image of Zorn courtesy ICA.