Vijay Iyer, Alone and With Others, at Zankel Hall Richard Termine for The New York Times Vijay Iyer: Solo, Trio, Sextet The composer and pianist at Zankel Hall on Saturday. His concert also featured musicians like Stephan Crump and Tyshawn Sorey. There were many possible points of entry to Vijay Iyer's immersive three-part concert at Zankel Hall on Saturday night, but the most illuminating was also the most deceptively simple. "Maybe I'll play a standard," Mr. Iyer said casually, introducing a solo piano mini-set near the program's midpoint. Then he began a murky, unsettled, slow-rumbling prelude, only gradually recognizable as the songbook ballad "Body and Soul." Disorientation, precise and knowing, is a proven method of engagement for Mr. Iyer, 41, who has recently made the transition from a highly regarded jazz outlier to one of its ascendant pacesetters. But his approach to "Body and Soul," once the theme emerged, wasn't scrambled so much as gently reframed. At one point he used his left hand to strike a rhythmic bounce, acknowledging the stride-piano legacy of the song; with his right hand he scribbled tight, fast figures that recalled no signature other than his own. The other portions of the concert featured Mr. Iyer with a trio and a sextet, addressing original music with a gripping sense of purpose. What was instructive about his brief solo performance - which also nodded to Thelonious Monk, by way of his tune "Epistrophy," and Randy Weston, whose style suffused an original ballad called "Spellbound and Sacrosanct, Cowrie Shells and the Shimmering Sea" - had to do with the transformation of familiar elements into a personalized new form. Playing music of his own design, Mr. Iyer found more use for recursive structures, lighting them up with complex rhythmic strategies. His chief partners were the bassist Stephan Crump and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who joined him in a slippery trio. They played "Break Stuff," a suite that Mr. Iyer recently created as a commission from the Museum of Modern Art. Opening in a crystalline calm, its first movement slowly gained heat and buoyancy as the musicians kept raising the stakes in undetectable increments. Eventually Mr. Iyer played a spiky trill in oblong meter, shifting the trio into a different groove. That theme, too, gathered force until reaching another segue set in motion by pianism. It was hypnotic, but hardly lulling. Mr. Iyer has had his most notable success in a trio format, working with Mr. Crump and the drummer Marcus Gilmore in the Vijay Iyer Trio, or with Mr. Sorey and the alto saxophonist Steve Lehman in the collective Fieldwork. So it was only natural that this trio found heavy traction. After "Break Stuff," it played Mr. Iyer's deft arrangement of "Little Pocket Size Demons," by Henry Threadgill, and a serenely ruminative ballad, "Desiring," that Mr. Iyer introduced on record a decade ago. The South Asian melodic inflection of "Desiring," which Mr. Iyer dedicated to his wife, was less pronounced in the sextet portion of the concert, which augmented the trio with Graham Haynes on cornet, Mr. Lehman on alto saxophone and Mark Shim on tenor saxophone. The first piece they played was "Hood," named after the minimalist-techno pioneer Robert Hood: Mr. Iyer set up its premise with a terse loop on Fender Rhodes piano, which the horns answered with a hiccuping repetition of their own. Elsewhere the sextet sounded freer and more combustible. Even with a smart, barking solo from Mr. Shim, "Down to the Wire" was effectively a drum feature, and not just during Mr. Sorey's lightning storm of a solo. "Poles," which had contrasting views from Mr. Lehman (tart, angular) and Mr. Haynes (dispassionate, flowing), rode a similar churn. And "Lies," which Mr. Iyer had adapted from a big-band commission, used the horn section as a pyrotechnic device, blasting and receding. The ensemble thrashed about, building steam, and finally everyone dropped out but the saxophones, braying in an argumentative tandem that finally converged in a pressurized unison. An earlier version of this article misspelled the title of a Thelonious Monk composition. It is "Epistrophy," not "Epistrophe."