"It's a different rhythmic language and a different harmonic language too," said Aaron Johnson, the musical director of "Fela!" and a member of the Afrobeat group Antibalas, the musical's house band.
In 1999, it performed with the Brazilian singer-songwriter Tom Zé, learning his idiosyncratic compositions and a new rhythmic language to go along with them.
Since his strong beginnings in the 1980's, creating a new rhythmic language for jazz with his Brooklyn-centered M-BASE crew, Steve Coleman, the alto saxophonist, has become a kind of globe-trotting guerrilla rhythm researcher, getting into the music of Africa, Cuba and Brazil and influencing a lot of young musicians along the way.
Thus it was by way of a new approach to texture, drawn from very old models, that he revitalized a 19th-century rhythmic language that had been in danger of expiring from textural and harmonic stagnation.
But as it turned out, the program's 21st-century curtain-raiser, Matthias Pintscher's "towards Osiris" (2005), though couched in a harmonic and rhythmic language far denser than Berg's or Schoenberg's, had at least tenuous connections to both works.
IT is a truism that the African elements in jazz's rhythmic language are often delivered with a Hispanic accent.
From his book, Amos emerges as a thoughtful, probably well-traveled man of fierce integrity, who possessed a poet's gift for homely but forceful imagery and rhythmic language.
In his early set he started with Miles Davis's early tune "Little Willie Leaps," a fast, harmonically complex number that showed Mr. Cary's familiarity with the rhythmic language of be-bop.
The game's vivid, rhythmic language adds to the attraction.
