Melancholia comes naturally to the Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko. Over the last decade, especially, during a late-career renaissance — Stanko, a pioneering figure in European jazz, is now 67 — he has distilled his art into a tersely controlled expression of sorrow. His dark-hued trumpet tone reveals itself in murmurs; he often begins a note with sibilant shooshes of air. He can make a straightforward melody feel confidential, guarded. His lyricism inhabits a haunting calm and produces a sombre beauty.

So one question, going into his engagement at Birdland this week, was whether Stanko would address a recent tragedy: the plane crash that killed his country’s president and dozens of other prominent Polish officials. The answer came halfway through the first set on Tuesday night, in the form of an elegy called “April Tenth,” after the date of the crash. Hymnlike at the outset, resting on a slow drift of chords, it soon unravelled into shapelessness, with Stanko briefly grasping at abstractions, unsupported by his band.

The song’s title wasn’t announced during the set, but its mournful essence was clear enough, yielding a singular tension in an otherwise tonally consistent performance. What rang strangest was its awkwardness, the sense that only Stanko knew what he was going for, and how to get there.

That may well have been the case: he’s on tour with the young quintet that appears on his new album, “Dark Eyes” (ECM). It’s a departure from the group he led through most of the last decade, which featured an excellent acoustic rhythm section now independently working as the Marcin Wasilewski Trio. Stanko’s new band has an electric guitarist and a bassist, both Danish, along with an acoustic pianist and a drummer, both Finnish. Its sound is denser, more plangent and textured, more given to droning groove.

“Grand Central,” which followed “April Tenth,” showed the strengths of this approach. Stanko projected a syncopated line over the rumble of piano and bass guitar; in the home stretch, he traded exploratory barbs with the drummer Olavi Louhivuori. Elsewhere in the set there were pieces with melodies arranged in unison for Stanko, the guitarist Jakob Bro and the pianist Alexi Tuomarila. Most of the time, the bassist Anders Christensen held onto a single note with a steady eighth-note pulse.

That pulse was the lulling through line of the performance, a liability even though it drove the brighter tunes. “The Dark Eyes of Martha Hirsch,” which closed the set, briefly settled in that vein, but then the band broke into walking swing. With it came Stanko’s most eventful solo, his phrases spilling one into the next as if to shed light on the path ahead.

— International Herald Tribune