For six years, until 2011, the guitarist Yonatan Gat was in Monotonix, a kind of garage-punk incursion unit from Tel Aviv. Generally, Monotonix set up on the floor of clubs, or in the middle of crowds in outdoor places, and ran rampant. The singer Ami Shalev set fire to things, swung from pipes, charged out of the room with the microphone, climbed on the audience and the other band members; the drummer Haggai Fershtman pummeled and crashed. Mr. Gat had to be the steady center of it. He had to keep the riffs going.
Those riffs were stomping and limited, based in the sound of late-1960s garage rock. Since Mr. Gat moved to New York five years ago and started his own band, a mostly instrumental trio with the Brazilian bassist Sergio Sayeg and the Israeli drummer Gal Lazer, his playing has bloomed with the patience to develop any shred of riff or groove into collective improvisation. He’s pushing outward, drawing from some of the great cross-pollinated grooves in ’60s music.
And so during his set on Tuesday at Union Pool in Brooklyn, you might have heard echoes of funk from Benin; Cuban son from Senegal; Chicano rock from Los Angeles; Afro-Brazilian soul from Rio de Janeiro; and the pentatonic and Arabic scales that connect much of the world. Mr. Gat’s music is loud and aggressive — somewhere in his imagination, he’s playing for the Who — but there’s always a lilt and an invitation in it. He leaves a space for you to get in.
The same goes for his concept of a performance. Last week Mr. Gat’s trio played afternoons in a studio at Pioneer Works, the art space in Red Hook, Brooklyn; they were crosses between rehearsal, gig, and recording session. At Union Pool, a proper gig was set up for the release of his band’s second album, “Director” (Joyful Noise). Mr. Gat stood near the door of the club, practicing without an amplifier through the opening band’s sets. At 11, his band set up in a circle in the middle of the floor, with Mr. Lazer’s back to the bar. Mr. Gat started a vamp, and the band took off. The music came to a complete stop only once or twice in an hour, but the basic protocol of a concert — the band stays here, the audience stays there — kept getting disrupted and turned over.
The set used the new material as a collection of expandable riffs developed through cool, reverb-soaked surf-rock phrases, power chords, scrabbling staccato and interludes of anything goes.
Mr. Sayeg connected with Mr. Gat’s vamps but put down his bass at a few points and sang his own songs in Portuguese, without worry of who would accompany him or how. Mr. Lazer stayed up to something interesting almost continuously. He sketched out detailed polyrhythmic funk chatter, keeping his playing intense even in quiet sections, and then abruptly left his drum kit to stretch or walk around.
At one point, singing in Hebrew without a microphone, Mr. Gat walked toward a man in the crowd, gently clutched his lapels and directed the song at him. At another, while keeping a vamp going, he climbed the stairs in the club and stayed at the balcony level for a while. He seemed comfortable; he didn’t do it in a showy way. Maybe he was aiming for a disruption — if so, he succeeded — or maybe he just wanted to hear it from a different angle. They were playing for themselves and they were playing for you, but they weren’t playing for any static definition of a concert.
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