A question-and-answer melody nudged them toward bebop, the turf of Charlie Parker and his successors.
Within the songs Mr. Sahir's voice was answered by melodies from accordion or violin, as pensive ballads made their way toward Middle Eastern dance rhythms.
For instance, Melody answered Ms. Davis's questions, and Ms. Davis acknowledged her answers and, during this class, Ms. Davis mentioned Melody in one of her instructional narratives, by using Melody's name in an analogy.
Ben Ellman, on tenor and baritone saxophone, played terse, bitten-off melody lines, answered by Jeff Raines on guitar and Richard Vogel on chortling, huffing keyboards.
Mr. Gurtu shifted among tabla drumming, with its dizzying, microscopically divided beats, to assembling funk patterns with a drum machine, to exploring the sounds of a gong dipped in water; he sang rapid-fire percussive syllables to answer and overlap simpler melodies.
Josue Domingues's electric bass purred the low harmonies, then answered the guitars with touches of melody.
His son answered with an improvisation that processed the melody into a digestible, light-FM-ready tune that resembled nothing so much as "My Heart Will Go On".
Krueger's plea is answered in no time; the comforting harmonica melody of "That's What Friends Are For" wafts through the room as Stevie Wonder appears.
Using question-answer pairs of melody lines and arpeggios that implied tonal harmonies but not a fixed tonal center, with each phrase looking back no further than the one before it, "Trinity" was like a slow, wistful version of a Coleman improvisation that had been purged of the blues.
She sets up layers of voices in flowing, multitracked choruses, which answer her own voice singing the primary melodies.
Brunning answered an advertisement for a bass player in Melody Maker.
