For any musician, complacency is the kiss of death. To settle down into that metaphorical easy chair and forsake any challenges to yourself or your audience is to become nothing more than negative space. Nowhere is this truer than in jazz, a genre founded on ever-changing, creative reinvention. Which makes its current dearth of say-nothingness especially frustrating. Need proof? Just turn on the radio, check out those pricey Uptown Gotham clubs. Oh, and bring a pillow. You're going to need it.

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Kali Z. Fasteau, however, will wake you right up. So will her music, a creative improvised style with roots in world sounds and the 1960s New Thing of innovators like John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Cecil Taylor. And, like the music she has made as a leader and with Archie Shepp, William Parker, Rashied Ali, Joe McPhee, the late Dewey Redman, and many others, Fasteau, 59, is a ball of surprises. She is eternally embracing higher realms, other cultures, new challenges. Always moving.

"For 14 years I lived on four continents, in thatched huts, [in] tents, on roofs, and on the ground, in tiny villages in India, Africa, and Turkey, as well as in cities, to experience many concepts of the divine in music," she says. "I treasure these profoundly transformative and indelible experiences of both the social and natural world. But I also discovered that we carry our thoughts with us wherever we go, so the real work on improving our heart, mind, and spirit takes place within us."

In recent times, Fasteau has done most of her work in the contemporary Newburgh home she's lived in since 1998. We have no problem believing the slender, black-haired musician is a former ballet student as she gracefully leads us through a hallway into her home's long, sunny music room. There, it quickly becomes apparent that the term multi-instrumental falls far short of defining Fasteau and her ever-expanding quiver of sound-making devices. The space houses a piano and cello, along with a few saxophones, a synthesizer, a drum kit. But what really catches the eye (and the ear, when Fasteau gives an impromptu performance near the end of our visit) is the kaleidoscopic collection of exotic instruments spilled across a tabletop near one of the tall, bright windows: Asian-African ney and Japanese shakuhachi flutes, North African mizmar (a cousin of the clarinet), Kenyan sanza (thumb piano), small and colorful hand drums. "I don't really have a 'core,' or primary, instrument," Fasteau, also a daringly expressive vocalist, explains. "It's always changing. Sometimes it's because of the circumstances—I couldn't really travel across India with a piano."

It was there, in 1980, that a yogi gave Fasteau her godly first name, after the clairvoyant and all-powerful Hindu goddess of energy and protector of the country's Dravidian class. "I asked him 'Why not Saraswati, the goddess of music and knowledge, since I'm a musician?'" she recalls. "He told me that Saraswati is a Brahmin derivative form of Kali. He said that the energy I channel through my music embodies the power of Kali, rather than her more tame derivatives."

Fasteau spent her early childhood in Paris, where she attended the multi-national UNESCO school; next, her family moved to Washington, DC, and finally New York City. Next to moving, music is another familial tradition. Her maternal grandfather was a symphonic cellist; her aunt an opera singer, concert pianist, composer, and conductor; her parents played piano and sang at home. At seven, she heard the great African folksinger Miriam Makeba, who opened her ears to world music, while her parents' influential record collection included titles by Miles, Monk, Errol Garner, and other jazz greats, as well as those of modern composers like Stravinsky, Bartok, and Debussy. Her multi-instrumental approach started with eight years of piano under Olga Heifitz (sister-in-law of legendary violinist Jascha Heiftiz), soon followed by studies in cello, flute, and voice.

Fasteau's interest in social activism also began early. As a high school student in 1963, she took part in the civil rights march that culminated with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech in Washington, DC; during her college years, summers spent doing social and voter registration work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Congress of Racial Equality took her to the Deep South.