A tall woman stands on the left of the stage in a copper and green colour-shifting dress that flares down to her feet. Her face is painted gold. Two white roses hang inverted from her thick braided hair, one at the level of her right shoulder and one just below it. Her saxophone sound is authoritative. It speaks strong, warm notes, fat with the roots of jazz, the ideas of Ornette Coleman, the language of ritual — pregnant with the spirit of exploration. This is Matana Roberts. Her fellow explorers are bassist Josh Abrams and drummer Chad Taylor. Together they are the Sticks and Stones trio, all Chicago-born and showing it.

The program states that Satoko’s "pianism evokes the dark resonances that jazz listeners associate with Randy Weston and Abdullah Ibrahim". Randy Weston cites Monk and Duke Ellington as early influences. Duke Ellington was drawn to Debussy and Weston has played Debussy’s music. Like Weston, Satoko loves to make the bass piano strings reverberate. She creates successions of shimmering sound with chords and melodic lines against pedal-held chords. Think Debussy, La Cathédrale engloutie.

An anecdote I once read about Monk — he used to eat at the piano and leave his dishes — forks, knives and plates — to pile up on top. One day as he played, he kept stopping to listen. What’s that? he said, sounds like an airplane or something. It was the sympathetic vibration of dishes, cutlery and strings.

The dark foreboding with which the group’s music started, arcs back to Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain or Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. And Debussy was influenced by the music of Spain — and of the East.