Sound of cultural conflux

The Silk Road Ensemble can be counted on for extravagant musical explanations: At Wednesday's Mann Center concert, one piece portrayed a mythical character who didn't just get too close to the sun, but melded with it - intentionally. Another was inspired by a battle that changed civilization and gave birth to a Chinese dynasty in 200 BC. Entertaining as these intros are, one happily reports that the music strayed far from the original idea. We don't need a 200 BC version of the 1812 Overture.

Though the Silk Road Ensemble has a semi-academic mandate to bring together musicians and musics from Eastern and Western cultures, the seriousness isn't earnest, thanks partly to the group's rock-band performance energy. Even when reading off scores, the musicians behave as if improvising. By the end of Wednesday's concert, the 15-member ensemble - headed (but by no means dominated) by cellist Yo-Yo Ma - had, above all, used its many musical ethnicities to achieve a particular creative freedom, one that recalls Miles Davis' late-1960s bands.

While Davis & Co. reached their musical netherworlds through vision and instinct, the Silk Road Ensemble starts with ethnic roots whose built-in formulas are challenged by the selectivity required in unlikely pan-cultural collaborations. Individual members maintain their identities but are thrust far from their comfort zones - encouraged by composers with fusion in their genes, from Jewish/Argentinian Osvaldo Golijov to the group's tabla player, Sandeep Das. The Silk Road instrumentation is dominated by conventional strings - with the built-in challenge of working with percussionists, pipa, and bagpipes.

How it works: A single member often starts the piece with a solo setting the emotional tone. But when you think you know where a phrase is going, it hangs a sharp left or right or maybe goes from a bowed to a plucked sound. Riff-like signposts sometimes appear when one instrument's turn is up and another is to begin. While Ma favors album titles like New Impossibilities, the music-making sounds perfectly possible, even inevitable.