Born and based in the alternative and indie rock hotbed of Athens, Georgia, guitarist, composer, and bandleader Dan Nettles couldn't help but absorb a sizable helping of anything-goes musical spirit -- at least from the rock side of the equation -- in a hometown that spawned the likes of R.E.M., the B-52s, Widespread Panic, and the Drive-By Truckers. But rather than seek a place amongst the city's rock scenesters, Nettles was strongly drawn to jazz as a creative outlet, and left Athens to pursue jazz studies at Boston's Berklee College of Music, incubator for some of the most noteworthy creative jazz talent in the nation, if not the world.

Returning to Athens after four years of study at Berklee, Nettles played jazz gigs around town but, confined by what he regarded as the idiom's strictures, he gravitated toward rock despite his jazz instincts -- until, that is, he attended the Banff International Workshop in Jazz & Creative Music high in the Canadian Rockies during 2004. There, workshop director Dave Douglas -- the award-winning trumpeter, composer, bandleader, educator, and world-renowned jazz boundary-smasher -- encouraged Nettles to follow his own muse back in Athens, suggesting that the guitarist help build a scene in his hometown by writing for and playing with collaborators whom he knew shared his own expansive sensibilities (an approach to music-making with parallels, it seems, in Douglas' own contributions to the so-called N.Y.C. downtown jazz scene circa the 1990s).

Taking Douglas' advice to heart, Nettles returned to Athens and formed Kenosha Kid (named after an ambiguous figure in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow), a project in which the guitarist and a rotating group of musicians not hidebound by tradition would perform and record his music, open to wherever the composer's imagination might travel. As it turned out, Nettles' compositions and Kenosha Kid's various instrumental configurations would prove particularly well-suited for silent film scores and a live theater production. The ensemble's first album, Projector, arrived in 2005; a recording of music composed as accompaniment to silent films by Charlie Chaplin and Ladislaw Starewicz, the album featured a sextet comprising Nettles on guitar joined by bassist Carl Lindberg, drummer Jeff Reilly, trombonist Dave Nelson, mandolinist Rob McMaken, and accordionist Rich Iannucci. A second silent film soundtrack, Steamboat Bill Jr., followed in 2008 as a CD/DVD set featuring the Buster Keaton silent film of the same name with music composed by Nettles for octet and tentet. This time, Nettles, Reilly, Nelson, Iannucci (on organ in addition to accordion), and McMaken were joined by three musicians the guitarist met at Banff -- Mexico City trumpeter Jacob Wick, Berlin alto saxophonist Peter Van Huffel, and Seattle tenor and baritone saxophonist Greg Sinibaldi -- as well as bassists Aryeh Kobinsky (acoustic) and Neal Fountain (electric).

Kenosha Kid's third studio album, 2009's Fahrenheit, released digitally and in limited-edition vinyl, consisted of Nettles compositions commissioned for a Brunswick, Georgia stage production of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and performed by a sextet of Nettles, Kobinsky, Reilly, Wick, Sinibaldi, and baritone/steel guitarist Neal Fountain. Next, Kenosha Kid returned to the studio -- amidst concurrent live performances documented as part of an avalanche of digital releases available on Nettles' website -- to record Inside Voices, which arrived in early 2015. The ensemble lineup on this fourth studio album featured a core trio of Nettles on guitar and loops, bassist Robby Handley, and drummer Marlon Patton along with Wick, Van Huffel, and Sinibaldi, three returning collaborators whom Nettles warmly nicknamed "the Horns from Hell." Nettles also announced that Outside Choices, a companion album to Inside Voices, would be released in 2016. ~ Dave Lynch, Rovi