The work Mr. Brown saw was “Revelations,” Ailey’s 1960 masterpiece. It made him realize that he “could choreograph and tell stories,” he said. “I started making up dances using my cousins and putting on shows.”

“The Call” is both intimate and spare; for just five dancers, it’s set to a surprisingly harmonious mix of Bach, jazz (by Mary Lou Williams) and Malian music, as performed by the Brooklyn-based Asase Yaa Entertainment Group. Despite the contrast in musical idioms, each section flows naturally into the next.

It opens with a canon in which one dancer enters after another, each executing the same stately sequence: a jump from the wings; a series of sideways steps with arms extended (as if measuring the space); and, finally, a rising up on tiptoe and turning to gesture to the next dancer, until all five share the stage, their movements echoing across it. Both the music — the slow section of Bach’s Trio Sonata in G — and the movement have a formal, almost classical quality. This, too is a reference to Ailey, Mr. Brown said: “His sensibility could be very formal. And there was something about that clarity of vision and simplicity that I wanted to evoke here.”

The call and response among the dancers eventually leads to an extended duet for a man and a woman, unusual for Mr. Brown. The two dance together again in the second section, set to Mary Lou Williams’s upbeat “Blues for Timme.” Jamar Roberts, who dances with Ms. Green in one of the casts, explained that during the creation process the choreographer had brought in photographs of Ailey dancing with Carmen de Lavallade, one of his earliest collaborators. (Ms. de Lavallade, now nearly 90, is still performing.)