Carnival of Soul

Against the odds, Guillermo Klein has held together Los Guachos, his multinational 11-piece big band, for almost a quarter of a century. In those years, this Argentine-born pianist and composer has moved across continents four times, and most of Los Guachos’ members have ascended to prestigious careers of their own.

But the ensemble has remained intact, allowing Mr. Klein to compile a songbook unlike any other in contemporary music: a travelogue as much as a repertoire, influenced by old and new tango, American jazz, modernism and indie rock.

Mr. Klein’s home country courses through everything he writes for Los Guachos, but he resists letting his music be pinned to a single influence or nationality. So his Sept. 27 album, “Cristal” — his sixth with Los Guachos and his 12th overall — is as explicit an engagement with Argentina as he is likely to make: Three of the disc’s nine tunes are based on pieces from the songbook of the tango star Carlos Gardel, a national hero from the early 20th century.

“The tunes I chose are extremely popular in Argentina,” Mr. Klein, who will turn 50 in December, said in a recent interview. “They’re songs that are in your subconsciousness.” He added, “It’s not even the music of your country — it’s the music of your life.” Still, in Mr. Klein’s hands, even these ubiquitous tunes sound like his.

On his arrangement of Gardel’s “Melodía de Arrabal,” which opens “Cristal,” the horns’ smeared, languorous phrasing of the melody reflects Gardel’s delivery on the original. And Los Guachos’ five-piece rhythm section gets in on it, too, with a groove that’s elastic and unsteady. On Mr. Klein’s own “A Orillas Del Rin,” a melodic thread hangs over a mysterious five-beat pattern, with a chord progression that never sits down and rests; it’s as if Gardel were crossed with Carla Bley.

In his originals, Mr. Klein aims for melodies and rhythms that feel utterly clear — like something Gardel might have crooned — but that also tangle, weave and interfere with one another, like a fugue or a hocketing chorus. Rarely does any single phrase stick around long enough for you to get comfortable. And he uses rhythm in complex, assertive ways, too. Mr. Klein seems equally enamored of Duke Ellington’s later work — when Ellington’s orchestra was moving from the dance hall into the concert hall, without sacrificing its thunderbolt percussive power — and the tangos of Gardel and Astor Piazzolla, whose music didn’t use heavy percussion but bloomed with persuasive rhythm anyway.

“The song is always shining through in his music; the melodies of the songs draw you in,” said the alto saxophonist and MacArthur fellow Miguel Zenón, who became fascinated by Los Guachos after hearing them in New York in the late ’90s, and soon joined the group. He remembered being impressed to hear “a lot of songs with lyrics” — which Mr. Klein often sang himself, in a dusty, disarming voice — and the band’s “visceral sound.”

When he joined Los Guachos (the name roughly means “the Bastards” in Argentine Spanish), Mr. Zenón took note of how much faith Mr. Klein put in his musicians; Mr. Klein sometimes brought in a bare-bones chart, or even just a melody, and allowed the band members to figure out their own parts together on the spot.

Mr. Klein arrived in New York City in 1994 from Buenos Aires, by way of Berklee College of Music in Boston. In 2000, shortly after the release of an arresting album, “Guachos II,” Mr. Klein left behind weekly engagements at two of the city’s finest clubs to return to Argentina. When that country’s economy fell to pieces, he went through a series of moves to Barcelona and back to Buenos Aires before landing back in the New York area in 2014.

When he first left, Mr. Klein figured that Los Guachos were finished. The careers of many members — like those of Mr. Zenón, the guitarist Ben Monder and the drummer Jeff Ballard — were picking up, and holding the group together became hard. “I was thinking, O.K., this is over,” he said.

But in 2002, two clubs where the band had played — Smalls and the Jazz Gallery — contacted Mr. Klein for a reunion show, and the group started reconvening in New York to play. In more recent years, Los Guachos have enjoyed a more or less annual engagement at the Village Vanguard. As if by its own stubborn insistence, the band has remained Mr. Klein’s most consistent vessel.

“Every time I play with them, I think it’s the last,” he said. “It makes it really beautiful.”