Joe Lasqo offers new Indo-Modernist and "Neo-Gaku" sounds woven from 3 strands:

* Indian & Middle Eastern music
* Jazz
* Stockhausen meets the sound of one hand clapping

(Photo: PeterBKaars.com, http://www.peterbkaars.com)

He's come to this music via a wandering path that's taken him through classical music studies in India, jazz studies in smoke-filled bars, computer music studies at MIT, Columbia & Berkeley CNMAT, & living (and listening) for years in various Asian countries.

He plays piano/keyboards, percussion, and Max/MSP as a solo performer and in collaborations with musicians and instrument-inventors.

Besides loving and playing the traditional musics of Asia and elsewhere with some very non-traditional instrumentation, he also uses Asian tools to build music with the compositional advances and new concepts of jazz and 20th-century music -- Stockhausen-type tone or timbre rows developed in Indian composition/improvisation structures, atonal and/or non-octave ragas, stochastic tala structures, ragam-tanam-pallavi leadsheets, and shakuhachi and gagaku pieces transmigrated into 21st-century bodies.

Joe can be heard in his regular booking at Viracocha (21st & Valencia, San Francisco) on Wednesday afternoons as well as various Bay Area venues. He has recently released an album, Turquoise Sessions, of modernist piano interpretations of ancient Indian and Japanese musics.