The music of Zachariah Lambert, a promising young NYC guitarist and composer, traverses a range of influences while maintaining sturdy roots in the jazz idiom. His compositions reveal a knack for melody while providing ample opportunities for Lambert’s prowess on his instrument, which runs the gamut between exhilarating runs and spacious chord voicing. Raised outside of Baltimore, Maryland, Lambert is now a Brooklyn resident, where his quartet is warmly accepted from bebop clubs to rock venues.

Lambert’s recent debut EP, “Circles,” is a thematically connected suite inspired by an exercise Pablo Picasso supposedly tasked his students with—to try over and over to draw a perfect circle, which is impossible. Picasso asked his students to then identify the most consistently imperfect parts of their circles and use that as the theme for their next painting. “Circles” employs this idea by stretching a simple motif to the limit over the steep harmonic shifts of three distinctly different pieces. Lambert and saxophonist Michael Howe drive steadily through this ever-evolving landscape on a road paved with the lock-up between bassist Cyrus Campbell and drummer Jonas Müller.