Instant Alter Play Their Mission Statement at SFJAZZ

The Sunday evening felt calm on Franklin Street, but inside the Joe Henderson Lab, Instant Alter were setting up something less serene. The New York future fusion group took the stage for an early set, part of an audience development push by Lo-Fi Oyster Co. that aims to bridge experimental music with wine and culinary spaces. It was the right room for a band that treats performance as a kind of alchemical exchange.

Led by vocalist Natasha Agrama and saxophonist Emilio Modeste, Instant Alter arrived with their 2025 debut album produced by Stanley Clarke. The connections run deep. Modeste plays in Clarke’s band, and Agrama is his stepdaughter. The rhythm section of bassist Brandon Rose and drummers Miguel Russell and Myles Martin was joined here by Will Calhoun from Living Colour and members of Wayne Shorter’s circle. The pedigree was clear, but the sound was decidedly present tense.

Agrama asked the crowd to take the static of the week, the year, and leave it outside on the sidewalk. “It’s going to ignite itself and turn into a million little embers and come back in this room and bless us,” she said. Then they kicked into “Sun Polaris,” the single that doubles as a mission statement. Hot sax lines cut over an active bass groove before her voice came in: “here in the golden dawn.” It felt like a line drawn not from escapism, but from a stubborn insistence on imagination as practice.

Modeste has described the band as “every dream of the future car