[JIM BAKER JAMMING WITH AN ARP 2600]

JIM BAKER: Okay. That part came on. I gues my name is Jim Baker, and that's what I'm bein told to say anyway. And, I guess, this is taking place at Hotti Biscotti. I've been playing here probably every Tuesday for about two years with these guys, and part about it I've been playing for a number of years in Chicago.

Music that doesn't make any money. Music that doesn't -- no, I don’t know. There's lots of ways of describing music I suppose.

[JIM BAKER PERFORMING]

I've been reading somewhere about David Byrne in his pre-Talking Heads days I I think sending us a kind of -- creating kind of surveys of prospective audience members asking what kind of music they like. Then I think he was using attributes like fast or slow or other things that maybe musicians wouldn't ordinarily think of, so I'm not you know -- I don't know. I mean you could look for genres like jazz or experimental or folk. I think this is basically folk music by itself but that could be a sort of a wry pun on an anecdote in the Bob Dome chronicles where apparently he introduced himself to Thelonius Monk and said he plays folk music and Monk said, "Yes. We all play folk music," so I guess, you know, that why we're all playing folk music here.

[JIM BAKER PERFORMING]

I think I started on piano many years ago, probably before you and most of your audience were born. I had some exposure to playing organ but never really had one until -- actually, I had a couple of them for a while. I was playing with some piano for a while. At some point, I got one of these things. This is an ARP 2600. This is by a company that doesn’t exist anymore. It's a black box with a bunch wires entered. This is a MIDI controller. It's -- I've got a lot of pawn shop. It doesn't actually work quite properly.

[JIM BAKER PERFORMING]

This is I think an attempt to basically replicate -- when I was growing up, I used to play gigs with Dixieland bands, some times in places that had old upright pianos and even those didn't work properly, so I think I was wanted to pick up a MIDI controller that would have some attributes like that; they wouldn't always work properly. This one is wonderful for that but it also fits in my cart.

I don't really like it but I sort of have an ironic attachment to it. It has a pretty good action but the action is very erratic, and sometimes the notes -- some of the notes don't work and I have to take out of the case and sort of mess with it to get it to work, but usually it works, you know.