Antonio Sanchez is no slouch when it comes to challenging his audiences. It’s been his modus operandi since he released his first album as a bandleader, 2007’s “Migration.”

It’s also a driving force behind the jazz drummer’s all-percussion soundtrack for the 2014 film “Birdman.” And now that the film has thrust Sanchez into the mainstream consciousness like never before, he has the opportunity to challenge a whole new audience outside the hardcore jazz heads.

He seized it Tuesday at 2nd Street Theater. With his longtime quartet, also called Migration, and guest singer (and wife) Thana Alexa in tow, Sanchez ripped through his new album, “The Meridian Suite,” in its entirety. The record, as Sanchez explained before the show, consists of one 56-plus minute composition, recorded in five separate sections.

Live, the band played straight through, stretching the suite to almost the 90-minute mark. In this setting, with the band’s members all facing one another, surrounded stadium-seating style by the sold-out crowd, the piece took on a life of its own.

The band began this epic journey shortly after 7:30 p.m., with Sanchez silently counting off John Escree’s winding piano motif, the oft-returned-to main theme of the piece. The band started out acoustically — Escree pounded on the grand piano while Sanchez locked in to Matt Brewer’s upright bass (a slight bass feedback issue early on in the piece was quickly corrected). Saxophonist Seamus Blake provided color early on, intertwining his leads with Alexa’s ethereal scatting to create eerie overtones that punctuated the dense rhythms.

“It’s like a movie,” Sanchez told GO! Magazine when discussing the suite before the show. While some of these filmic qualities can be heard on the recording, the full effect is only realized in the live setting. Here, musicians’ solos became character monologues; Blake and Alexa’s interweaving melodies were conversations. Sanchez’s drumming served as the story’s heartbeat — not dissimilar to the “Birdman” soundtrack’s role. The band shifted from waltz to fusion, hard bop to utter chaos, often in the space of a few measures, always playing with the same running musical themes.

Things reached a feverish crescendo in the finale, in which Blake’s electric wind instrument, or EWI, took center stage. Throughout the evening, Blake wrestled some unbelievable sounds out of the EWI; here the instrument mimicked a raging electric guitar. His solo built to an impressive climax before the band cut out, leaving Escree to conclude with a gentler version of the long-running motif.

It would have been nice to sit with the performance and absorb its nuances after the show, but there was a lot going on Tuesday night. Sanchez and company concluded right at 9 p.m., providing just enough time to get to Volcanic Theatre Pub to catch “the world’s first and only metal mariachi band,” Metalachi.

The California five-piece returned to the venue after debuting there in March, and was greeted by a large crowd consisting of many fans from the previous show and new converts. After a 40-minute wait, the band took the stage in various combinations of sombreros and leather (trumpet player El Cucuy’s outfit was the winner here — a cross of Gene Simmons, GWAR and traditional garb).

As the name suggests, Metalachi plays metal covers with traditional mariachi instruments. Quiet Riot’s “Bang Your Head,” Guns ’N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” and AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” among many others, all got the treatment.

While each song elicited knowing grins and some singing along, the joke grew thin after about a half-hour (and became positively not funny with Extreme’s “More Than Words,” which barely counts as metal, if it even counts at all). Fortunately, a pretty righteous Metallica medley and an encore of Dio’s classic “Holy Diver” ended the show on a couple of high notes.

— Reporter: 541-617-7814, bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com