Although the notion of combining a jazz band with a string quartet is not exactly new, the blend has rarely been as fruitful as it is on Patrick Zimmerli's Phoenix, released earlier this year on the Vancouver-based Songlines imprint. In fact, the two musical styles are so well integrated they hint that a fresh, hybrid form is emerging, thanks to genre-bending innovators like the New York City saxophonist, who is in his late 30s.

"It's really in the air," Zimmerli says, reached at home in Brooklyn. "It's something you can't avoid. I suppose there are still people who are specialists in one form of music or another, but most of us, by default, have a very broad experience of music, and if you're musically curious you're bound to go down many paths. In this day and age it's really easy to expose yourself to an amazing variety of great music, so for people of my generation it's very natural to blend a lot of things together."

Zimmerli finds that he still has to pursue two separate career paths: classical composer and jazz saxophonist. "In a way, I have a sort of schizophrenic output," he says. "My classical concertos, of which I've written two, are quite extensive, elaborate pieces in the style of Johannes Brahms-except that there's a jazz percussionist in the mix, and the piano part calls for some improvisation. But the pieces on Phoenix seem to stem more from jazz. First of all, I'm playing saxophone on it, which is the quintessential jazz instrument, and the forms are generally much simpler."

For a relatively unknown artist to bring an eight-piece band across the Canada-U.S. border, on the other hand, is not simple at all, and so when Zimmerli visits the VCC Auditorium on Friday (October 7), it's his improvisational side that will be to the fore. And he'll be working with three local performers-pianist Chris Gestrin, bassist André Lachance, and percussionist Sal Ferreras-instead of his New York compatriots, although this in no way dampens the saxophonist's spirit.

"I love Vancouver musicians, and I'm looking forward to playing with those guys," he says, citing our town as one place where his kind of genre-jumping has already got a firm foothold. He's also looking forward to doing some recording while he's out west, with an eye to an upcoming Songlines release.

"I would not be where I am today, for better or for worse, without the support I've had from Tony Reif," he says of the Songlines founder, who's long been a supporter of interdisciplinary and multicultural art. "I've had experiences with other labels where there's kind of an oppositional feeling, but with Tony there's none of that. He's just really interested in what I'm doing, and he supports it in a very wholehearted way."

Zimmerli and Reif's mutual admiration indicates that we'll be hearing more from the New Yorker, both on disc and in local concert halls. If so, that's no bad thing: he clearly has his finger on the future's hybrid pulse.