Mind Over Clatter

Eventually, though, the couple talked their way through the door and were not disappointed. From the sample he'd heard in San Francisco, Amirkhanian knew that Nancarrow was gifted at playing off of and against musical conventions, particularly those involving time.

According to Nancarrow biographer Kyle Gann, his compositions "explored every aspect of different tempos run against each other at the same time, from relatively simple ratios like 4 against 5 against 6, to hard-to-perform ones like 60:61, up to e against pi." The mind-blowing complexity of these pieces is especially odd, given the instrument that performed them: a simple player piano of the type usually found spouting "Maple Leaf Rag" in a faux saloon.

Transcribing orchestral pieces to the paper rolls that instruct player pianos is, to say the least, an arduous task. Nancarrow had to invent a hole-punching device that could measure -- with startling precision -- the exact amount of space between notes needed to make the piece play properly. Each composition required six to eight months of transcription time.

"He was way ahead of computer music," Amirkhanian says. "And he did it with a hole-punching machine. Totally analog, you know, like Gold's Gym."

Once he'd met Nancarrow, Amirkhanian the maven then gave way to Amirkhanian the connector. He returned to the Bay Area determined to get Nancarrow the exposure he felt his music deserved. Amirkhanian played and promoted his work on the radio, and eventually, in 1977, convinced an acquaintance at the fledgling Berkeley label 1750 Arch Records to distribute some of Nancarrow's player piano recordings. They didn't sell well, but they did succeed in bringing exposure to Nancarrow, who was awarded a "genius" grant by the MacArthur Foundation in 1982.

By 2000, when Other Minds released a group of his unpublished works on its tiny label, all of Nancarrow's works had been recorded. "After that, I kind of pride myself for having a nose for this sort of thing," Amirkhanian says.

Amirkhanian's knack for finding and showcasing unusual musical artists earned him a small but avid cult of listeners during his 24 years at KPFA. One of those listeners was an art gallery owner named Jim Newman, who had been obsessed with envelope-pushing music since he discovered bebop during the mid-1940s.

Newman, 68, grew up in Omaha at a time when there really was no musical generation gap. Polio hobbled him at a young age; he remembers not being able to match the alienation he was feeling with anything in contemporary music until the first bebop records burst onto the scene, fully formed, in the mid-'40s. (The music's early years were cloaked during World War II by a ban on recording; the shellac used in phonograph records was considered a war resource too valuable to waste on entertainment.)

When bebop was finally recorded and distributed to a wide audience, it seemed revolutionary, and sounded like nothing that had come before. Unlike the catchy pop tunes that had dominated airwaves for the previous two decades, you couldn't dance to bebop. It demanded an unprecedented virtuosity from musicians and employed dizzying, complex chord changes, sophisticated harmonies, and, frequently, blistering tempos.

"From that point on, I think I was always interested in what was new," Newman says. "There was a point when I was made aware that Bird and Dizzy were listening to Stravinsky and Bartók. I figured I should be too."

Newman arrived in San Francisco in 1956, just a year after earning a music degree from Oberlin College, and opened a jazz club. In 1958, he co-founded the Dilexi Gallery, which helped launch edgy Bay Area painters and sculptors, including Jeremy Anderson and Roy DeForest. His interest in music never waned, though, and Newman sought out -- and sponsored -- whatever new sounds he could, a quest that inevitably brought him to Amirkhanian's radio programming.

"Charles," Newman recalls, "was constantly bringing to my awareness people I hadn't been familiar with." Amirkhanian and Newman met several times over the next few decades, but their relationship remained primarily one of radio host and listener.

In the mid-'80s, Newman began patronizing a peculiar new music organization called the California College of Performing Arts, which he describes as a "floating university." In reality, it mostly sponsored house concerts designed to bring experimental musicians into contact with their hard-to-find audiences. By the early 1990s, though, the college's original organizers had moved on -- one passed away; the other left the Bay Area. Newman took over as president, and took on the task of raising the college's profile within the new music community. The best way to do that was to bring aboard the man who knew everyone in that community, Amirkhanian, who had left KPFA to become the director of the Djerassi Artists Residency Program, a picturesque retreat for artists in the hills above Stanford University.

Amirkhanian had also been putting his connections to work with a festival in Telluride, Colo., where he had no trouble drawing the biggest names in experimental music but an impossible time drawing anyone to see them. "In Colorado, nobody cared," Amirkhanian says. "But here, a lot of people do."

The two men agreed that an experimental music festival had a better chance of succeeding in San Francisco than in Telluride; they also agreed that, to attract a wider audience, they'd need a new name. Newman mentioned a line in a New Yorker obituary for their shared idol, John Cage: "His epitaph might be that he composed music in others' minds."