Ezra and Ernesto on guitars

Ezra Sturm & Ernesto Diaz-Infante — The Escape (Muteant Sounds, 2024)

Ernesto Diaz-Infante was one of my earliest encounters on the Bay Area music scene. I remember receiving his music at KZSU — contemplative solo piano albums like Itz’at initially, then guitar explorations like Wires and Wooden Boxes. (Follow those links to find them on Bandcamp.) He’s worked in groups often enough, but in my mind, his name ties to mostly solo work, especially long-form guitar explorations, sometimes soothing, sometimes rumbling.

Lately he’s performed in a duo with his son, Ezra Sturm. I’ve gotten to enjoy their live performances twice this year, and they’ve collaborated on an album, The Escape, featuring Sturm on electric guitar and Diaz-Infante mostly on acoustic.

A standard mode of conversation for them is for Diaz-Infante to create a percussive field — rapid picking or a hard-clipped strumming — against slower, fuzzed-out blasts from Sturm. They work within a language of sour tones, both electric and acoustic. Their improvisations often build a tangible rhythm, and they are not above riding the occasional groove. “Tears Before Chaos” opens with an electric guitar blare like a slow alarm, backing fodder for Diaz-Infante’s acoustic rustlings that spike into hyperkinetic mode, but it ends with Diaz-Infante strumming a cycle of chords with Sturm’s fuzzed-out electric joining in.

The closing track, “When the Clock Hits Midnight,” is another beast entirely, based on steady synth arpeggios against an atonal electric-guitar chime. Marjorie Sturm’s flute, subtly nestled against the synth sounds, alternates between sublime and ominous. The piece is dark on the surface, but by the end, it’s got a spring in its step.

Ernesto Diaz-Infante and Ezra Sturm, during their Day of Noise sound check

In March, I got to see Sturm and Diaz-Infante play a long-form improvisation at the Luggage Store Gallery, both on electric guitars. They opened a strong program that also included Pet the Tiger and the quartet of Darren Johnston (trumpet), Christina Braun (movement), Ivy Woods (double bass), and Rent Romus (sax).

Before that, Diaz-Infante and Sturm appeared on KZSU’s Day of Noise 2024, again both on electric. They were in an especially exploratory mood, wandering into ethereal territory that showed they continue finding new ground, six months after having recorded The Escape. We streamed Day of Noise to the KZSUlive channel on YouTube, meaning you can experience that performance right now.

Diaz-Infante is having a prolific year. Amor Celestial and For Jim Ryan both feature pairs of long-form works, the latter album having been performed in honor of the late saxophonist Jim Ryan. I’m hoping to write more about Jim (and that tribute album) soon.

Zappa and the tyranny of time

San Francisco Contemporary Music Players — RE:visitations
SF Conservatory of Music
Saturday, January 27, 2024

I have often wondered about avant-garde compositions and the limitations of time. Performances are rare for most of these pieces, and the work isn’t simple. Do performers struggle to find the time to do the work justice? Is the problem even worse for a large ensemble? For an orchestra?

Back in January, Eric Dudley (SFCMP Artistic Director) and Steve Horowitz (now an SFCMP director as well) gave a pre-concert talk confirming that the answers are Yes, and there’s no magic formula to get around it.

Frank Zappa’s The Perfect Stranger was the program headliner for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players that night, in a program titled RE:visitations, and Dudley and Horowitz prefaced the concert by discussing Zappa’s ambitions and methods. Zappa’s bands — the large ensembles with the jazzy horns and heavy doses of improvising — rehearsed something like 10 hours a day and lived together for long periods of time. They worked on the music, and the rewards are evident in the performances.

As Dudley explained, Zappa famously admired the “20th-century” classical masters, beginning with Edgar Varèse, and, despite being a proud iconoclast, yearned to be accepted in their company. He eventually got his wish. The Perfect Stranger: Boulez Conducts Zappa (Angel/EMI, 1984) documented three “serious” Zappa pieces including the title track, alongside some early Synclavier constructions. And the final album released in his lifetime, The Yellow Shark (Barking Pumpkin, 1993), documented a live concert by Ensemble Modern.

Regarding Perfect Stranger, Zappa appreciated Boulez’s dedication but was disappointed that the orchestra didn’t have time to thoroughly work on the music. Dudley and Horowitz said they feel the same frustration: There’s so much great work out there and not enough time to devote to each piece.

My own frustration with time is a lot cushier: There’s more music available than I can absorb, and I don’t have time to study the “serious” pieces as deeply as I’d like. No, that’s not quite it: There was always more music out there than I could handle; it’s just that now, I’m more aware of it, and it’s all more accessible. That’s a happy place to be in, really. For performers trying to champion new music, though, the frustration must be tormenting.

As for the performance itself, The Perfect Stranger was a delight. I had not heard the piece before; it certainly sounds “classical,” slower and more serious than I’d expected, even after the dynamic opening with the doorbell chime (the story behind the song is hidden in there). Fewer moments of levity than you would expect from a prankster god, but it is also replete with Zappaesque licks, especially from the percussion.

Adding to the joy of a live performance is the ensemble’s physical layout, which Zappa’s score specifies: The group is divided symmetrically down the middle, with instruments paired on each side in mirror-image fashion. The two percussionists, whose role is vital and dramatic, were highly visible on the extreme ends of the stage, rather than hidden in the back. We got to see their arrays of instruments laid out on long tables, and watching them prepare for the next bit and wait for their cues helped make the piece absorbing. Down the middle are some of the unpaired instruments — notably harp (Meredith Clark). She got some showcase moments, but it was also easy to track the harp’s “comping” contributions. The visibility mattered.

Immediately before The Perfect Stranger was Boulez’s own Derive I, Dudley having enthusiastically paired the pieces for comparison and contrast. Shared elements included melodic phrases that hung in the air, drifting — but The Perfect Stranger felt more showy, as if laying out a proof that Zappa’s language could fit modern classical music’s idioms.

Derive packed plenty of punch itself, and the smaller ensemble of six made it a bit easier to track individual instruments. Tod Brody on flute started the piece off with dynamic energy, and violinist Hrabba Atladottir was a propulsive force.

I enjoyed the rest of the program too, including two new compositions and a piece by Louis Andriessen that played against short soundless films. It’s all listed at the SFCMP site, and hopefully I’ll find time someday to type up those notes.

SF Tape Music Festival 2024

SF Tape Music Festival
Victoria Theatre, San Francisco
Sunday, January 7, 2024

Abstract music tells a story. There is a trajectory — maybe a gradual buildup, maybe the classic fast-slow-fast, maybe an epic novel of surges and fades. But reaping these rewards can take focus. Sure, I sometimes play sfSound Radio in the car, but much like a complex novel, listening to electronic music is most rewarding in an undistracting environment that lets you absorb.

Francis Dhomont, 1981. Source: Radio France, where you’ll find an hour-long Dhomont documentary (in French) broadcast early 2023

That’s what makes the San Francisco Tape Music Festival special, and it’s why it fills up the Victoria Theatre. This is a gathering place for people who want to celebrate this music and hear the pieces presented with dedication: high-end loudspeakers surrounding the audience, lights off (save for the glowing EXIT signs), and mixing-board curators tweaking the stereo pieces to take advantage of the speaker field. The atmosphere is communal — artists chatting, catching up on one another’s projects and lives, then going reverently silent during the program.

“Tape” music refers to an audio composition committed to fixed media, the term dating back to reel-to-reel tapes and the musique concrète work that began 75 years ago. Nowadays, is done digitally, but the practice and process of musique concrète still fascinates, and part of the fun is to learn the real-world sound sources that mutated to form these pieces.

Adam Stanović’s Into the Sea used the normally pleasant sounds of a crashing surf to create glimpses of gaping terror. As you can read in the concert program, Stanović had played ocean sounds to his mother in her final stages of cancer — a gesture of comfort, but one that he believes could not bring her peace. “I couldn’t listen without hearing terror, agony, and fear,” he writes.

Boyi Bai’s Echoes of National Parks drew from recordings at National Parks. I remember a lot of water involved, and the larger project, What Does Your National Park Sound Like?, bears that out. But there were also human-made sounds (a bell), wind, possibly some traffic. You can hear it on Soundcloud.

One of the “classic” pieces, Xenakis’ Concret PH from 1958, sounded glassy. I pictured solid glass rods spilling out onto a floor, bouncing a little. But no — Xenakis used the sound of burning charcoal, clipped into an irregular percussive flow.

Some pieces went amusingly “meta” by using other pieces as sources. Brian Reinbolt’s Bischoff Surface Variations was built from segments of John Bischoff’s electronic music album surface variations, used with permission. Francis Dhomont, who had died weeks before this show, had submitted a new piece to the festival: Somme Toute, an octophonic construction alluding to many of his past works — a joyful crazy-quilt of sounds.

And Matt Ingall’s new revision of Scherzo. Allegro molto included chopped-up recordings of his own radio interview about the Tape Festival and the original 2002 version of Scherzo. Allegro molto, making it possibly the only Tape Festival “song” ever to include the title. That piece began with segments of intensely fast cuts with lots of musical sources — Ingalls’ own clarinet, out-jazz, cartoony sounds.

This year, sfSound posted extensive online notes for each of the four programs that it presented, a rich resource for learning about the pieces and the composers. Here is the link to the Sunday show’s program, and below is the Sunday agenda, with links to artists’ own pages:

Sunday January 7, 2024 (7:00pm)
PIERRE SCHAEFFER – Étude aux tourniquets (1948)
BRIAN REINBOLT – Bischoff Surface Variations (2023)
BOYI BAI – Echoes of National Parks (2023)
JOÃO PEDRO OLIVEIRA – N’vi’ah (2019)
THOUGHT GANG (ANGELO BADALAMENTI (1937–2022) & DAVID LYNCH) – Stalin Revisited (2018)
MATT INGALLS – Scherzo. Allegro molto (2002/2024)
JOHN GIBSON – In Summer Rain (2021)
GILLES GOBEIL – Un cercle hors de l’arbre (2014-2015)
MAG G I PAYNE – Aries 2020 (2020)
ADAM STANOVIĆ – Unto the Sea (2022)
IANNIS XENAKIS – Concret PH (1958)
FRANCIS DHOMONT (1926-2023) – Somme toute (2022)

The joys and sorrows of itkuja

Rent Romus and Heikki Koskinen — Itkuja Suite, Invocations on Lament (Edgetone, 2023)

(Rent Romus’ Life’s Blood Ensemble will perform Itkuja Suite on May 27 (8:00 p.m.) and May 28 (4:00 p.m.) at Berkeley Finnish Hall, 1970 Chestnut St., Berkeley.)

Manala, released in 2020, was the second in a trilogy of jazz-centric albums exploring saxophonist Rent Romus’ Finnish heritage. That album retold legends of the underworld and the afterlife. Itkuja Suite, completing the trilogy, brings us back to the struggles of the living world through the jazz-minded Life’s Blood Ensemble and some boldly emotive singing by Heikki Laitinen.

Itkuja is a traditional Finnish music of lamentation, but its singers are hired for weddings as well as for funerals. It’s a dichotomy that I think we all have a sense for. There are glimmers of thankful happiness in times of mourning, and there is a heaviness and longing that accompanies moments of joy.

In that light, Itkuja Suite deftly traverses emotional borders, at once railing against the cruel world while inviting us to dance to big band-inspired jazz. But this isn’t about contrasting two extremes; to me, it’s more an exploration around a multi-dimensional field of conflicting, intertwining senses. Laitinen sings in Finnish and Karelian, in personalities ranging from weepy to a menacing growl. Traditional songs provide much of the lyrical source material, although there is also a song mourning the Soviet Union overrunning the Karelian region (a WWII-era development that parallels Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) and an original itkuja written by Romus, inspired by his own quest to recover his heritage.

The inspiration and some of the words date back centuries, but this is also a jazz project at heart, with most pieces written or arranged by Romus or Koskinen. The band delivering it is Romus’ Bay Area-based Life’s Blood Ensemble, 11 musicians counting Laitinen, Romus, and Koskinen, and they get ample room for soloing: sax, trumpet, flute, vibes and cello all take lead positions.

The songs best exemplifying the itkuja spirit might be those that open with majestic drama and then step into a more energetic, jazzy space. An example is “Runkoterian halla (Rungoteus),” which is based on a fable about a rye farmer and his spirit of perseverance. It’s a little more than a minute before the jazzy segment kicks in, with solos by Koskinen on e-trumpet and Romus on alto sax:

Explore more at Edgetone and Bandcamp.

Bleeding Vector and Stash Wyslouch

Bleeding Vector (Lorin Benedict and Eric Vogler)
Stash Wyslouch
Luggage Store Gallery
Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Stash Wyslouch occasionally bashes at the guitar in the way you would expect from someone who has never held a guitar. But seconds later, he replicates that same bashing. It’s precision insanity. Then he’ll follow it up with rapid-precision bluegrass picking. Like an express train, it’s all in your field of vision, then gone.

I knew none of this before stopping by the Luggage Store Gallery. My only hints came from the blurb in the calendar entry, which included an admiring quote from Billy Strings, a bluegrass band leader with jam-band tendencies. Not the name that usually comes up in jazz/improv circles.

Billy Strings was talking specifically about The Stash Band, a quartet that mixes meticulous bluegrass roots with the bent-mindedness of They Might Be Giants and Eugene Chadbourne. At the Luggage Store, Stash was playing solo, filling the space with his voice and guitar. Every other song was straight roots/bluegrass, starting with “I Ain’t Got My Walkin’ Shoes No More.” Every other other song was a twister like “Micro Rage Biomes Occupy the Cosmos,” so random and chopping — but full of repeatable intent.

Here’s a different performance of that one, less slashing than what I remember, and showing off Stash’s picking abilities.

I don’t want to make Stash sound like an amateur. He’s versed in music theory and oddball scales, as evidenced on his YouTube channel. That’s what makes his wackiness work. One song he played included a retelling of the melody using only harmonics. I found myself looking to other audience members to confirm that yes, this was goddamn impressive.

Stash was preceded by Bleeding Vector, the duo of Lorin Benedict (voice) and Eric Vogler (guitar), improvisers who wobble and spin near the axis of the jazz tradition. The performed one long piece, fluid and often dense, flipping through their own compositions and some established jazz pieces, including an interpretation of “Solar” which, they later told us, had one chord intentionally dropped.

Benedict and Vogler are two-thirds of The Holly Martins, whose 2010 album, no. no. yes. no., was similarly airy and lightly bopping, drenched in the light-touch velvet of Benedict’s voice and the spritely jump of Vogler’s guitar, aided by Kasey Knudsen on sax. Underneath the jazz sheen, you’ll find lots of angles and twists. It’s worth seeking out.

A Dance of Maps

“A Synesthete’s Atlas” at Shapeshifters Cinema
Sunday, September 25, 2022

Using digital maps as his medium, Eric Thiese is honing a new type of visual-art performance. On a projector, in real time, he pans, zooms, and rotates street maps, playing with color and text fonts along the way. Often the street and regional names are visible, but I prefer it when he turns them off, creating an abstract geometric space. Disorientation is core to the experience, and some of my favorite moments come when the image, in motion, stops looking like a map and becomes a sparse universe of lines and curves.

“A Synesthete’s Atlas” combines this video dance/movement with improvised music. Thiese performed the concept nine times in 2022, and I saw the seventh of them, a duet with Kyle Bruckmann on oboe and analog electronics.

Electronics suit “A Synesthete’s Atlas,” maybe because they fit the brain’s expectations: abstract sounds against abstract visuals. Fittingly for a map-based performance, Bruckmann’s electronics were often in an exploratory mode, a gradual hovering of buzzes and clicks. He would later tell us he’d performed with lines and rotations in mind. Oboe segments likewise hovered — long tones and overtones, with gradual variations like a geological expanse — but later moved into bursts of notes, at one point accompanied by an electronics loop with a slight random element added.

Thiese’s browser-based controls have their limits; the occasional abrupt shift in the visuals breaks the spell for a moment. Rotations and zooms, though, operate on computer presets that move smoothly. Overall, the concept is satisfyingly hypnotic, and it adds a novel visual aspect to solo musical performance.

It also aligns Thiese’s interests in experimental film and music with his cartography-related day job. In fact, he gave a presentation about his work at the 2022 North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) conference in October. Here’s the video of his session, which begins with excerpts from five previous performances including the one with Bruckmann. On Vimeo, you can also see snippets from his debut performance, with Helena Espvall on cello and electronics.

Incidentally, Thiese’s NACIS talk plugs a performance with Liz Draper, bassist for the indie rock band Low. He mentions that she was available because a bandmate was taken ill — and, sadly, Mimi Parker would die of ovarian cancer just weeks later. Draper is indeed familiar with experimental settings, and she’s a composer as well. Check out Liz Draper Bass on Youtube.

Hooray for John Finkbeiner

Guitarist John Finkbeiner passed away a little more than a year ago. On a Sunday early in October, his friends took over the Ivy Room, a neighborhood bar in Albany, to celebrate his life and music. The event was co-organized by his partner, Lisa Mezzaappa, and one other musician (possibly John Schott, who emceed?). Many, many groups played in mostly abbreviated sets, stretching from the late afternoon well into the evening. It was a happening full of community and love, and it was wonderful.

Of course, I’d known Finkbeiner through his creative-music side. He was part of the quartet Go-Go Fightmaster and the Lisa Mezzacappa Quartet (same personnel, different bands). He applied a sense of humor to these efforts, evidenced by the album he and Aaron Bennett made making music out of drinking straws. The Quiet Storm All-Stars, a trio including Bennett, played one of those songs at the Ivy Room; the straws have holes, so they can play notes like a kazoo or a raspy recorder. Serious silly fun.

But another side of Finkbeiner was his love of traditional music, dub, and Caribbean dance rhythms. I’d actually known about some of this this already. I encountered him once, long ago, playing as part of a small ensemble — was it during New Year’s Eve? — playing some form of conventional jazz, and during a break, I introduced and explained myself. He was surprised. It was rare for an audience member to cross those two worlds, especially in that direction.

So, John Finkbeiner crossed boundaries, and the Ivy Room event was a chance to mingle among all those worlds. Meaning in addition to some excellent creative jazz, we got treated to acts like Hiroshi Hasegawa’s Poontang Wranglers, who took the stage decked out in orange long-johns. Their vaudville-like set featured exuberant old-timey music with a washtub bass, washboard percussion, and a bunch of ukeleles, among other instruments. It was great fun, although Hiroshi himself was in Japan and unable to make it. (I get the feeling Hiroshi is always “in Japan.” The band had that kind of absurdist bent.)

Setup for Aaron Novik’s band Kipple. Moe! Staiano, center, prepares to play an instrument built by Tom Nunn (another musician who recently left us). Graham Connah on keys; Tim Bulkley on drums, I think; Lisa Mezzacappa back there on bass; and John Schott helping set up.

The passing of a loved one is sad, but it’s also a chance for family and community to connect, recognizing that person as the intersection of so many lives. I can’t claim to have been one of John’s friends, but I was still able to celebrate his life and celebrate being there, watching so many of the musicians whose work I’ve enjoyed over the past two decades or more. It felt good to be reminded that community isn’t dead. John’s parents were there. A childhood friend who now runs a boutique ice cream truck parked outside the Ivy Room for most of the afternoon and gave out cones and cups.

And then there was Joseph’s Bones.

This was a highlight for me, Jason Levis’ instrumental dub band with three horns and two guitars: John Schott and Myles Boisen (who both appear on the band’s album, along with Finkbeiner) plus Levis on drums and Mezzacappa on bass. Lots of energy behind mid/fast grooves, and one brilliant solo after another, from the horns certainly but also the guitars, spitting bluesy psychedelic joy. The kind of music that just makes you smile. Drummer/leader Jason Levis had a poignant moment at the end of the set, talking about Finkbeiner’s loss. “We didn’t know if would ever get to play this music again,” he said.

At the merch table, we were encouraged to help ourselves to posters and pins made for the occasion, as well as music — including Joseph’s Bones’ Nomadic Pulse/Pulse in Dub, a vinyl double-album, gracefully packaged (and still available on Bandcamp). I balked a bit at that, knowing vinyl is a pricey endeavor.

But Levis told me something to the effect of, “If there’s an empty turntable out there, I want this to fill it.” He wants the music to live on. Who wouldn’t? People make music because it fills the soul, yes, but it means a lot to the musician to know it’s reached somebody, and it’s possibly more important to know this for a fellow musician who’s transitioned on. That album is spinning on my turntable as I write this. I hear you, John.

Read John’s obituary in BerkeleySide.

Guerilla Hi-Fi, the night’s closing act.

Ben Goldberg in the great outdoors

Ben Goldberg’s Jewish Leftist Intellectual in Salesforce Park. Most of the crowd was off to the left or the right, because all those colorful chairs were in the direct afternoon sun.

Clarinetist Ben Goldberg named his new trio Jewish Leftist Intellectual — it’s meant to be a little bit whimsical and certainly political. The band performs Goldberg’s compositions, combining his clarinet with accordion (Rob Reich, a frequent collaborator) and bass (Daniel Fabricant), all three exchanging pebbles of melody and rhythm in a free-form tumble.

It’s still a band-in-progress, to the point where Goldberg sprang ideas at the others shortly before their first-ever performance, about a month ago in San Francisco’s Salesforce Park. Several other songs were taken from Goldberg’s work during the isolation of the pandemic, when he spent several months of creating and recording a composition per day. (You can hear those results on Bandcamp, in an “album” called Plague Diary.)

Salesforce Park is an urban oasis, a four-block stretch of greenery elevated above the financial district’s traffic and bustle. It’s does feel a bit corporate, but it’s new and admittedly pretty and offers a space to contemplate the sun and sky against the glassy skyscrapers. Jewish Leftist Intellectual was the last in a small run of summer jazz concerts, held out in the open — and it was nice to see that the bill included creative music acts, such as Larry Ochs/Gerald Cleaver, Rova, and Citta di Vitti (the trio of Phillip Greenlief, Lisa Mezzacappa, and Jason Levis).

The open-air venue, suffused with the quiet of a Sunday afternoon, was well suited for the show’s laboratory nature. Goldberg had a concept of how this band could operate and what it could become, but the specifics were still vague, he admitted to us, and the trio had rehearsed just once. But of course, “jazz” inherently involves making things up as you go, and it also relies on teamwork; the fact that Goldberg and Reich have worked together on so many projects certainly made the whole setup less risky. The trio transitioned seamlessly from composed themes to group improvising to solos. You would never have guessed that the band, and two of the songs, were so new.

In addition to selections from Plague Diary, the show included two of Goldberg’s “Porch Songs,” themes written for a porch concert where Goldberg did not communicate any of the music to the musicians ahead of time; he started playing, and the others were obligated to jump in. (Those were the rules for the original porch concert. Jewish Leftist Intellectual used sheet music.) If you’re wondering how that might work, consider “Porch Song 2.” It’s a brain teaser, hopping around the chord wheel in a pattern that I’m guessing professional musicians can work out quickly — but only after hearing a complete cycle. (The cycle also ends with a bout of old-timey clarinet jazz, which is nice.)

It’s interesting to think of this band as not only a part of the renewed spring of live music and community, but also as a way to apply and extend Goldberg’s work of the past two years. Plague Diary is free in its entirety at the link above, and you can hear more of the Porch Songs on Ben Goldberg School Vol. 2: Hard Science, on Bandcamp.

A Happy Blues Story

Owen Maercks — Kinds of Blue (Feeding Tube, 2019)

I wish I’d noted the DJ’s name, because I know firsthand how gratifying it is to hear you’ve turned someone on to something new. So to whomever was on-air at KALX that evening — the midnight of a Saturday/Sunday transition, just a few weeks ago, I think — thanks.

That show replayed an interview with Owen Maercks that was probably conducted in 2019. Maercks, a guitarist living in the East Bay, had come out of musical retirement to record a blues record with quite a cast: local giants Henry Kaiser, Larry Ochs, Scott Amendola, and Plunderphonics creator John Oswald. Maercks clearly hung out with the right people. He came across as intelligent and engagaing, and the one track I heard (I surrendered to sleep shortly after) was bright, springy excitement. I promptly bought the album.

Until now, Maercks’ sparse discography included only one record as a leader, released in 1978. Much like Duane Kuiper’s lone home run, that isolated album was enough of a story to bring Maercks some notoriety years later. Teenage Sex Therapist was reissued by Feeding Tube Records in 2014, generating some overdue press for Maercks. Here’s an example, if you can tolerate SFGate’s smothering advertising. Even better, that album includes Ochs and Oswald and especially Kaiser, who’s been Maercks’ compatriot for decades — making Kinds of Blue a reunion of sorts.

Whereas that first album was rock, informed by punk and no-wave but sounding like neither, Kinds of Blue is rooted in blues, with Maercks’ low, growly singing invoking hot sunlight on lush Southern riverbanks. It’s a twisted blues, though. The opening instrumental, “Wild Time,” features a time-signature glitch as a hook and a dive-bombing Kaiser solo.

Kaiser’s sonic webspinning appears throughout the album. (Maercks takes solos as well, speaking the same psychedelic language.) And Ochs, on the folky “Beautiful to Me,” revels in retro rock-‘n’-roll blasts crinkled with skronk.

“Beautiful to Me” is also fun for its giddy, absurd lyrics (“I don’t care what the manatees say, you’re beautiful to me.”) “Burnin'” is rich in a different way, telling an epic, vague story about “the burnin'” in Saturn, Alabama (a nod to Sun Ra). As on Therapist, Maercks displays a knack for imaginative lyrical themes and a sense of humor.

Released solely on vinyl, Kinds of Blue‘s two sides are named “Inside” and “Outside,” and the descriptions are accurate. “Inside” has plenty of adventure; in fact, every track mentioned above is on that side. “Outside” rockets immediately to distant orbits with the dissonant, thorny “Iceland Boogie.” That side also includes two of the album’s three covers. One is a Picasso-filter version of “Blue Monk” — big fun. The other is “Wrong,” an obscure song by 1960s bluemsan Robert Pete Williams that starts out spare but ignites into a groove that provokes some of the most heated soloing and singing on the album. It’s not to be missed.

Kinds of Blue is bluesy, noisy, outside-y, and just plain fun. I’m happy that Maercks got back on the map, and I’m also grateful for the DJs out there who keep the spirit of college radio alive.

Feeding Tube is on Bandcamp, but to find Kinds of Blue, you’ll need to visit their website.

Music at MOMA: A lesson about Joan Mitchell

Back in November, I spent an afternoon at the San Francisco Museum of Art. The centerpiece exhibit was a sprawling retrospective of American abstract painter Joan Mitchell, who worked from the 1940s until her death in 1992. The event drawing me there was an evening of music and poetry curated to go along with the exhibit. The unexpected reward was an education in Joan Mitchell’s art and her love of music. I wasn’t familiar with her work before, and now I’m a bit of a fan.

Joan Mitchell, Paris, 1956. Photo: Loomis Dean

Of course, I was really there for the music: Phillip Greenlief and Evelyn Davis, followed by Larry Ochs and Donald Robinson. Two duets sandwiched by three brief poetry recitals. Each duet performing an improvised set to the audience that packed the hallway adjacent to the exhibit. That included families with small kids, many of whom drifted away, predictably, but also came wandering back, which was a pleasant surprise.

Greenlief and Davis (saxophone and keyboard) performed one long piece, opening with slow tonal explorations and lots of extended playing. Their set built gradually, with a good sense of drama and a patient eye toward building a singular shape. Ochs and Robinson took a different approach, playing a few pieces, mostly bright and provocative. I’d seen them perform back in July, outdoors, and it felt good to watch them again in a different setting.

Greenlief and Davis, small silhouettes toward the right. The performance was in a hallway along the periphery of the Mitchell exhibit.

The binding factor that brought us all together, though, was the art. And I rediscovered why art, like music, has to be experienced live. On the web, at first blush, Joan Mitchell’s work didn’t interest me. I like abstract painting, but her squiggles and splatters didn’t feel intriguing.

In person, that all changes. Due to the sizes of the canvases, each individual piece envelops you. The color strategies that separate one painting from another become more important, and seeing several paintings in a row provides the contrast that makes each piece’s personality more evident. Up close, you get a sense for their differences, and sometimes you can feel like you understand why a piece had to exist.

Better still, the exhibit was a chronologically arranged narrative of Mitchell’s career, showing phases from early, less abstract pieces to the grand canvases that she is best known for. The sense of history and of place — Mitchell, an American, worked for years in Paris, and the exhibit included plenty of photos of her studio there — imbue the work with a deeper life.

As for the tie to music and poetry, that wasn’t superficial. Both fed Mitchell’s creativity. “Music poems, landscape, and dogs make me want to paint. … And painting is what allows me to survive,” the exhibit quotes her saying. Jazz was part of her life, as were symphonic music and opera. In 1979, she befriended composer Gisèle Barreau as a creative peer, and one of Mitchell’s major works, a diptych of canvases, is named Two Pianos, after Barreau’s 1982 composition Piano-Piano, “which balances masses of percussive sounds with flourishes of flute and piano melodies,” as the MOMA placard put it.

Music informed Joan Mitchell’s paintings, and on that November evening, her paintings inspired the creation of new music. I like that.