Kenosha Kid

The moniker Kenosha Kid originates from an enigmatic character in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Creative jazz guitarist, composer, and bandleader Dan Nettles launched the ensemble in 2004 within his native Athens, Georgia. After studying at the Berklee College of Music, Nettles participated in the Banff International Workshop in Jazz & Creative Music in the Canadian Rockies, where award-winning trumpeter, composer, bandleader, and educator Dave Douglas urged him to pursue a non-idiomatic jazz direction by teaming with sympathetic Athens musicians and strengthening the broader jazz community inside the Southern stronghold of alternative and indie rock.

Nettles initially conceived Kenosha Kid as an outlet for his silent film scores, drawing from a fluid roster of players unbound by jazz conventions. The group's debut release, Projector, appeared in 2005; this recording of music written to accompany silent films by Charlie Chaplin and Ladislaw Starewicz presented a sextet with Nettles on guitar alongside bassist Carl Lindberg, drummer Jeff Reilly, trombonist Dave Nelson, mandolinist Rob McMaken, and accordionist Rich Iannucci. The follow-up silent film soundtrack, Steamboat Bill Jr., emerged in 2008 as a CD/DVD package pairing the Buster Keaton silent film of the same title with Nettles' octet and tentet compositions. Nettles, Reilly, Nelson, Iannucci (switching between organ and accordion), and McMaken were augmented by three musicians first encountered at Banff—Mexico City trumpeter Jacob Wick, Berlin alto saxophonist Peter Van Huffel, and Seattle tenor and baritone saxophonist Greg Sinibaldi—plus acoustic bassist Aryeh Kobinsky and electric bassist Neal Fountain.

Kenosha Kid's third studio album, Fahrenheit, arrived in 2009 on digital formats and limited-edition vinyl; the set comprised Nettles compositions written for a Brunswick, Georgia stage adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and performed by a sextet of Nettles, Kobinsky, Reilly, Wick, Sinibaldi, and baritone/steel guitarist Neal Fountain. The band next entered the studio, between live shows preserved among numerous digital releases on Nettles' website, to track Inside Voices, issued in early 2015. This fourth studio album featured a core trio of Nettles on guitar and loops, bassist Robby Handley, and drummer Marlon Patton together with Wick, Van Huffel, and Sinibaldi, three returning associates whom Nettles affectionately dubbed "the Horns from Hell." The companion album Outside Choices followed on September 1, 2017.