Photo by Lindsay Beyerstein

Steve Greenlee reviews Thursday night’s performance by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society at Regattabar in today’s Boston Globe.

“There’s nothing else like Secret Society in today’s jazz scene,” he declares. “His music, which relies as much on hard rock as swing, is ambitious, relevant, and alive. The band played all seven songs from its exceptional 2009 album, Infernal Machines, and each selection was preceded by a little story—a brief lecture, really—by Argue, who explained each inspiration. ‘Habeas Corpus,’ ominous and tense with its barrage of staccato notes, was dedicated to Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was rendered to Syria and tortured in a case of mistaken identity. ‘Phobos,’ otherworldly and hypnotic, was about a moon of Mars whose orbit is slowly descending. As ‘Transit’ [a chaotic, swinging composition that drew from Argue’s experiences aboard Fung Wah buses] rolled along, it grew wilder, almost engulfed in flames; miraculously, it never broke down.”