by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“It’s funny what you can get away with, with a visual thing going on,” says Athens, Georgia’s Dan Nettles, “in terms of dissonance and strange noises and stuff.”

Nettles, the guitarist, composer and director of the band Kenosha Kid, has his work cut out for him. He’s bringing the “strange noises” of jazz to unlikely listeners—the modern-dance and spoken-word scenes, the film buffs and indie-rock hipsters.

Kenosha Kid boasts an elastic line-up of crack players, a diversity of live-setting applications, a spectrum of moods ranging from pensive to playful and a multifarious musical palette connecting not only various points in jazz history but also its nodes of interface with other genres—“Here in Athens, there’s so much college rock, it just seeps into what I do anyway.”

So equipped, Nettles and Kenosha Kid aim to shake off what he calls the “burden” of jazz, in Athens at least (aging crowds, petrified culture), while keeping his efforts accessible to the unconverted.

The leading line of exploration for Kenosha Kid is the accompaniment of silent films, old and new. “The film thing began as a way to get the audience to check in, in a different way. And also the band members, because we end up performing everything in a very different way, ultimately, when the movie becomes the score.

“It’s the same with the dancers, and we also have a New York poet, Laylage Courie, that’s working with us on an hour-long piece called ‘I, Marlena,’ which is really cool, too. We performed that last week in a window on 42nd Street—at noon. It’s a piece about this girl destroying her cubicle and all this stuff. It was quite enjoyable, so maybe next time we’ll be bringing that piece through.”

This weekend, KK’s steez is strictly films. In addition to a pair of early silent classics, which for rights reasons will remain unnamed, the band (which boasts Montrealers Joel Miller and Gordon Allen for this gig) will have its way with the half-hour video collage Animal Time (a “blurry-eyed Koyaanisqatsi” boasting jellyfish, dancers, waves and old Christmas trees, by South Carolina’s Kevin Hoth) and Vancouverite Cindy Mochizuki’s Hammock & Sling Part 1, commissioned specifically by Kenosha Kid.

“The setting is a train ride and a girl’s memories,” explains Nettles. “It’s not plot-driven, though there is a loose narrative. It involves animation, live actors and also stop-motion slideshow sort of aspects.

“The new films are born out of collaborations, because of the rights issues, and also because, while I enjoy the old silent movies, I also really enjoy working with something more contemporary.”

That modern mindframe is reflected even in Nettles’ painstaking compositions for the classic flicks, which would seem to cry out for an antique sound. “That’s not what they mean to me,” he says. “They kind of mean something new—I guess from when I was a kid, watching Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton or the Chaplin movies on TV. I kind of play from the feelings I had then.

“Now there are double and triple meanings, because I’ve performed and watched the movies all over the world, in different settings. So now they have all these other memories associated with them. In a way, they’re films, but also packages of all these other experiences that I’ve carried with me.”

With Tessa Jones and Bear Cave at Casa del Popolo on Saturday and Sunday, April 8–9, 9 p.m., $8

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