Its flinty independence and brawny, expansive sound, in songs like "Jeremy" and "World Wide Suicide," have remained intact, and the group consistently fills arenas without Top 40 hits, commanding a fan devotion enjoyed by the likes of, say, Phish.
Mr. Eskelin, the tenor saxophonist, has been around New York for more than a decade, and with his classically brawny, gargly sound and good imagination for harmony, he's one of the more talented moving parts of the downtown jazz-related improvising scene.
When I tried to resume my journey, my big brawny car sounded like the little engine that could not.
He cut a very convincing figure, but I can remember making nervous jokes at the briefing with my fellow reporters -- even then, the brawny pronouncements sounded brittle, past their prime and not a little scary.
The compactness of the audience had no effect on the energy that Mr. Gilbert and company brought to their performance; in fact, in Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony, which closed the program, it seemed almost as if the players were overcompensating with a bigger, brawnier, punchier sound than this work is usually given these days.
Arthur Blythe, whose brawny alto saxophone sound and independent spirit made him a standard-bearer of the New York jazz avant-garde in the late 1970s, died on Monday at a retirement home in Lancaster, Calif.
And "Starships" doesn't jibe with the sometimes brawny, almost always male sound of Hot 97, where women are often relegated to R&B.
The sound is brawny and dark-hewn, with melodies that sing every bit as much as a bowed or blown instrument.
But a steaming pie filled with tender sweet apples and maybe onions, and bolstered by brawny bits of pork, sounded much more appealing.
For most of the 2010s, 20-something men in weathered baseball caps injected the genre with an almost comical masculinity — brawny, hip-hop-inflected sounds, lyrics that treated women as objects of lurid attention.
