Chaos is always exciting and sometimes funny, too — at least to a safely removed observer. So when guitarist Nels Cline found himself cursed by a loose amplifier tube that made his guitar roar like a dyspeptic Mechagodzilla during some of the more sensitive moments in the Scott Amendola Band’s performance a week ago Monday at the Zeitgeist Gallery, it was hard to suppress laughter. Not from meanness. After all, there’s genuine beauty in bandleader/drummer Amendola’s compositions, which give plenty of melodic and improvisational leeway to his soloists, Cline and violinist Jenny Scheinman. It’s just that the rude, unpredictable, and stunningly loud blasts of low-toned feedback sounded almost exactly like parts of Cline’s solo in the previous tune, "A Cry for John Brown."

Sweet and clean-toned on the band’s new Cry, Cline laced "John Brown" with strychnine in the Cambridge gallery/performance space. He did a nimble dance between fleet bursts of modal runs — stretching the tune’s harmonic center in all directions — and his array of effects pedals, which included a battered old delay/sampler that generated a slab of noise every time he snapped one of its switches on. So his solo went something like "melody — BLAT! — melody — BLAT! — melody — BLAT!" And the juxtaposition was riveting, perhaps even a reflection of the abolitionist’s conflicting passions for peace and justice. But when the pattern accidentally repeated itself in the next number, often when Scheinman or bassist Todd Sickafoose seemed about to launch into a melodic statement of his own, well . . . chaos.

For the most part, though, the quartet were in superb control. Minus the sax and the vocalist from the album, Scheinman in particular had more room to solo, generating airy lines that floated over Amendola’s gently driving patterns and Sickafoose’s warm, woody upright. Amendola’s music is more strongly rooted in the ’60s free-jazz tradition than the pop-funk hybrid he usually plays as the locomotive in guitarist Charlie Hunter’s band. As such, it was less earthy than Hunter’s music, more capable of transcendent moments when the tones of Cline and Scheinman blended as delicately as the fingers of lovers’ hands and Amendola and Sickafoose plied gentle, slightly hesitant beats and a spray of cymbals that underscored, rather than drove, the chords.