" data-original-title="" title="">Darcy James Argue brought his 20-piece Secret Society to Manhattan's cozy Jazz Gallery to showcase Dynamic Maximum Tension. The hourlong New York performance was as original and delightfully unpredictable as everything the Canadian-born composer/conductor touches.

The recording—released in the fall, nominated for a Grammy and on Ludovico Granvassu's Garden of Jazzy Delights 2023 and Katchie Cartwright's Best Jazz Albums Of 2023 year-end lists—is no ordinary tribute to an artist's musical inspirations. To start, many or most of its pieces were inspired by non-musicians, from thinkers to poets to scientists.

At the Jazz Gallery, Argue's passion for these people—and his fertile intellect—came across in often-lengthy introductions to the pieces. Ahead of "Codebreaker," dedicated to the British World War II mathematician Alan Turing, he outlined Turing's heroic and tragic life, which ended in suicide after he was charged with homosexual activity—then a crime in the UK—and given estrogen in prison. Preceding "Your Enemies Are Asleep," a line from a 19th-century Ukrainian poem, he noted the title's terrible relevance to the country's current conflict, and dedicated the performance to "parents in Ukraine trying to keep their children safe." "Ebonite," Argue amusingly informed us, celebrates not a person but a substance—a "miraculous hard rubber," in Argue's words—that found its way into that most Canadian of items: the hockey puck.

"Ebonite" exemplified Argue's talent for brilliantly evoking his subjects through deft writing and clever allusions. The piece loped along in the rhythm of obscure Argentine chacarera folk music—the seeming connection between ebonite and the music being a huge rubber tree Argue saw in the heart of Buenos Aires. With equal slyness, "Codebreaker" rose to swaggering, brassy peaks before ending in sustained, pulsating musical figures that evoked the German Morse code transmissions that Turing and his team cracked.

In the middle of "Winged Beasts," dedicated to "my compositional mentor," the late