By the time Lawrence “Butch” Morris takes the stage on Friday night, he’ll have spent four days rehearsing with the Buffalo Improvisers Orchestra. Yet the sound of “Leap,” the name of the piece Morris will direct that night, won’t be known to the composer or the collective of 19 regional musicians until it happens. This is the whole concept behind conduction, an approach Morris has used for 23 years. Without any notated music, it requires the musicians to respond to a series of gestures from Morris, such as sustain or repeat, which represent ideas on how to play. The musicians are left to decide what pitch or register to play.

Don’t call it free improvisation or free jazz, because conduction doesn’t function in the same manner. Yet Morris, who started out playing cornet with jazz musicians like David Murray and Frank Lowe, has worked with free players in this context as well as classical musicians. Both types of musicians often find the conduction process to be at odds with their experiences, since nobody solos and no one has a written score. By learning and interpreting Morris’ vocabulary over the days of rehearsals, the musicians help to shape the new piece of music.

Steve Baczkowski, musical director of Hallwalls Music, saw Morris perform in Manhattan three years ago and started thinking about bringing him to Buffalo for an artist residency. “It was like watching one person play 30 instruments at once,” Baczkowski says of the concert. “Though he was clearly at the helm, each individual musician had the opportunity to contribute to the ensemble. It wasn’t coming from him, but it was certainly coming through him. He would wave that baton in front of the group and sound would follow everywhere it went. Or not follow, according to his instructions.”

Baczkowski, who plays tenor saxophone and bass clarinet in the performance, secured funding for the performance from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Music Fund, and gathered musicians who would devote time for four nights of rehearsals and one performance.

The instrumentation is a wide-ranging mix that incorporates acoustic and electronic elements, with everything from strings, woodwinds, vibraphone and brass to a live sampler. Morris doesn’t care if one instrumentalist has experience improvising. “I’m interested in a sound and something growing out of that sound,” he says.

Morris says he comes to each performance with a similar standpoint of teaching his methods. “Everybody has to learn the conduction vocabulary: a sign that means sustain, a sign that means repeat, which has five different meanings, a sign for melodic information, graphic information, and so forth,” he explains. “And in the course of me instructing them on the ways and means of conduction, I also learn their abilities to create spontaneously, to function as an ensemble and as different instrumentalists in the ensemble. The more I get to learn them and the more they get to learn, then it gels on its own.”

In many instances, things didn’t gel right away. In a recent interview on National Public Radio, Morris recounted a story of working with a group of classical musicians who couldn’t get past the idea of working without any written music or music stands at rehearsal. It took nearly two days for the ensemble to get beyond their preconceived notion and trust his direction.

Jazz musicians, who often work in open settings, find their own barriers. Many come expecting to work as a soloist, when in fact, no one takes solos in conduction. Also, “a lot of musicians like to close their eyes. You can’t do that,” Morris says. “You have to look at me all the time. Even when I turn my back, when you think I’m not thinking of you and I can’t point at you, I know where you are and I know what voice I want to hear.”

Some musicians, even improvisers, expect to get ideas on what to play, which goes against Morris’ whole concept. “If I start giving examples—when you come in here, you can start playing texturally here, you can play ambiently here—then they’re going to start doing what I tell them to do,” he says. “I have to provoke something in the musician and I have to hit some nerves that are a little different than other ways of working. Otherwise, I might as well show up with a bunch of music and say, ‘Play this; you solo here and you solo here.’ I could do that in two days.”

Four days of rehearsal sounds like a good deal of preparation, but Morris hopes that in the future, he can spend more time preparing an ensemble for a performance. “Conduction, as far as I’m concerned, is an iceberg: You’re only really seeing the top of it,” he explains. Ten days of practice would be an ideal time to prepare. “Then you really start to see the possibilities emerge. And to see the musicians’ faces light up with all these new ideas they didn’t have on the first through fifth day. It just opens up a new latitude to what the possibilities are.”

Since he began working with conduction more than two decades ago, Morris estimates that more than 4,000 musicians in 18 countries have participated in his work, of which “Leap” is Number 173. As he discusses it, the method doesn’t sound as remote as some might expect. “Conduction is symbolic information in the same way that music notation is symbolic of music and that writing is symbolic of speech,” he says. “If you can understand it from that point of view, I think we’re halfway there.”

In addition to Baczkowski, the Buffalo Improvisers Orchestra includes Jenece Gerber (voice), Geoff Perry (violin), Mary Ramsey (viola), Jonathan Golove (cello), Greg Piontek (contrabass), Stuart Fuchs (acoustic guitar), Joe Rozler (piano, synthesizer), Michael Colquhoun (flutes), Mike Allard (alto sax), Rey Scott (baritone/soprano sax, oboe), Bill Sack (electric guitar, prepared lap steel guitar), J.T. Rinker (laptop, live sampling), Dave DeWitt (tuba), Andrew Peruzzini (trumpet), Jim Whitefield (trombone), Ravi Padmanabha (tabla, percussion), John Bacon (vibraphone, percussion) and Ringo Brill (djembe, congas, percussion).

Morris leads the Buffalo Improvisers Orchestra on Friday, February 29, at Asbury Hall at Babeville. For more information, call 854-1694 or visit hallwalls.org.