Leyla McCalla @ la Maroquinerie, Paris

Only nine months after her memorable appearance at the Sons d'Hiver Festival in Créteil, where she opened for her friend and former Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla was already back in Paris. This time she was at La Maroquinerie with her own band, presenting Sun Without the Heat, an album that takes her already broad musical vocabulary and stretches it even further.

Trying to put a genre around McCalla's music has become increasingly pointless. Jazz, Caribbean music, funk, country, blues, bluegrass, soul and ragtime all find their way in, along with traditional music from Haiti and the United States. None of this feels like genre-hopping for its own sake. These sounds have histories that overlap, sometimes in ways that aren't immediately obvious, and McCalla seems interested in finding those connections.

The new band makes those connections particularly vivid. Drummer Caito Sanchez, bassist Pete Olynciw and guitarist Nahum Zdybel give McCalla a remarkably flexible framework, capable of sounding sparse and delicate one minute and surprisingly forceful the next.

Olynciw is particularly fascinating to watch. At times he coaxes sounds from the bass that could almost be mistaken for a horn, adding another melodic voice to the arrangements. Zdybel approaches the guitar from stranger angles, dropping oblique jazz figures into the songs before suddenly breaking loose with a fiery solo. Sanchez can hammer out a heavy, almost chain-gang rhythm, then pull everything back and decorate a quieter passage with small, precise flourishes.

In the middle of all this is McCalla, moving between banjo, guitar and cello and singing with a voice that doesn't need to overpower the room to command it. There is strength in her delivery, but also tremendous warmth, and the intimacy of La Maroquinerie suits her particularly well.

The repertoire covers almost as much territory as the musicians. Torch songs sit next to protest songs, lullabies give way to funkier material, and old folk traditions keep surfacing inside music that sounds completely contemporary. Sun Without the Heat provides much of the evening's character, continuing McCalla's exploration of Haiti and the American South while opening the arrangements to funk, jazz and more electric sounds.

What's impressive is how naturally it all hangs together. McCalla doesn't present these traditions as separate exhibits, stopping to announce that we're moving from Haitian folk to blues, jazz or country. One rhythm leads into another. The cello changes the character of a folk melody. A guitar phrase pushes something toward jazz. The bass suddenly sounds like a brass instrument. The connections reveal themselves while the band plays.

Nine months earlier in Créteil, McCalla had been part of an evening built around musical history and the paths connecting different cultures. At La Maroquinerie, the same curiosity is present, but the setting and this particular band make it feel looser and more physical.

There is plenty to think about in Leyla McCalla's music. There always is. But tonight there is also a very good band on a small stage, finding unexpected grooves inside old traditions and having a hell of a time doing it.