Thursday night, WHRW brought some jazz to the Chenango Champlain Collegiate Center. Bands Consider the Source and The Evan Marien Project performed as part of the second official Jazz Night. The event was organized by Evan Flury, a senior majoring in music and history, who created Jazz Night last year in order to diversify the music scene on campus.

“I had seen folk, hip-hop, indie and electronic artists on campus but never anything that would be considered jazz,” Flury said.

But when creating Jazz Night, Flury dealt with several issues. Namely, should he bring traditional jazz ensembles to campus, or should he push the envelope and introduce the student body to the many new and exciting forms of jazz? Perhaps even more importantly, who was he trying to reach: existing fans of the genre or newcomers who may have yet to be initiated to the world of jazz?

“I tried to be careful to not alienate too many fans of traditional jazz. Last year I asked the Blue Velvet Swing Band to open for Zongo Junction,” Flury said. “This year, I’ve stepped a bit farther out with the bands, keeping traditional jazz band setup, but looking at different mixing of genre and sounds not associated with the term jazz.”

Enter Consider the Source and The Evan Marien Project, two groups that incorporate traditional jazz elements from all eras of the genre while seamlessly embracing countless styles of music from all over the world. Both groups push the limits and defy any musical pigeonholing or categorization. Flury said that his choice of such modern, experimental bands was “entirely intentional.” As jazz, it’s sweeping, extensive and at times even vague and overwhelming.

The night began with Consider the Source, a New York City trio of guitar, bass and drums. The group has garnered cult success over nearly a decade of extensive touring and writing with their eclectic mix of funk, progressive rock and Middle-Eastern styles. And they provided a dynamic set, leaving the audience dancing, jumping and even in an awed hush, often within the course of a single song. The group had the audience’s attention from the get-go, but had them gripped with a thrilling, spaced-out Radiohead cover. The musicians’ idiosyncratic styles ran the gamut from progressive metal to classically-trained melodic runs to all-out funk, slap bass included. The unique synthesizing abilities of Gabriel Marin’s guitar also allowed for musical tangents that would please the modal jazz fan and the Middle-Eastern aficionado alike and provided some of the most enthralling moments of the evening. The group finished their set with “Keep Your Pimp Hand Strong,” which after eliciting laughs with its title, left the audience wishing the band could play for hours more. But after the song’s bluesy final bars, the band called it a night to resounding applause.

During a 30-minute intermission, members of Consider the Source mingled with the audience, and after a rapid setup and warmup, The Evan Marien Project, led by their eponymous bassist, began their set. A slightly more traditional group, Marien’s melodic and distinctive bass-playing grabbed the audience and kept them captivated. While Consider the Source had audience members dancing and bouncing, The Evan Marien Project kept them grooving in a trance, appealing to the sensibilities of more traditional jazz fans and giving newcomers in the audience a taste of the music that comes to mind when someone says the word “jazz.” The group was received just as well as Consider the Source, and the evening ended as a resounding success.

Despite a seeming lag in jazz’s presence in the public consciousness, Flury is hopeful for the future of the genre, and after the turnout and success of the most recent Jazz Night, one is compelled to believe it. He sees the genre as having evolved alongside the rest of the music world — which has simultaneously become more egalitarian — with musicians pulling influences from across the world. This fosters a new sense of exploration and creativity, allowing for music that was unimaginable until today.

“It is hard for new bands,” Flury said. “Jazz has been around for a little over a hundred years, so there is a veritable smorgasbord of good, better and the best players that America has fostered. I think, however, that as the music and the public perception thereof has changed, so have the artists. They have learned to spread out from the footprint of the greats and explore territory that would never have been possible 30 or 40 years ago.”