Some musicians chase fame. J.A. “Dino” Deane chased wild and unruly ideas. A trombonist turned electro-acoustic mad scientist; a collaborator with John Zorn, Jon Hassell and Ike and Tina Turner; as well as Butch Morris, Dino treated sound like a living thing—something to be bent, warped and occasionally drop-kicked into uncharted territory.
Deane died in 2021, and now, Carlos Santistevan, a bassist with a knack for low-end heft and high-stakes improvisation—not to mention a longtime member of local arts and music collective High Mayhem—is set to carry forward Deane’s musical legacy through a memorial concert alongside the release of an LP featuring Deane’s ensemble, Out of Context.
A Musical Pioneer
Though not a household name, Deane’s influence on music stretches well beyond the Southwest and touches down within scenes from New York City to San Francisco. A pioneer of live sampling, electro-acoustics and conduction—a method of real-time ensemble direction using signs and gestures—Deane’s work was about pushing boundaries until they snapped.
“Dino [was] one of the people who helped invent the concept of live sampling,” Santistevan explains. “Back in the ’70s, he was bringing reel-to-reel tape machines on stage and setting up microphones and being a performer that wasn’t generating his own sounds, but sampling the rest of the band and running it through signal processing.”
The Art of Conduction
Perhaps Deane’s most significant contribution was his work within conduction, a form of conducted improvisation originally developed by cornetist, composer and conductor Butch Morris. Deane began collaborating with Morris early in the development of this musical language.
“He joined Butch starting with conduction number three. Butch did a total of 280 conductions, I think” Santistevan says. “He helped him develop the whole thing.”
To the uninitiated, conduction looks like chaos: A conductor signals with gestures like a flick of the wrist or a pointed finger, and the ensemble reacts in real time—no sheet music, no roadmap. But Santistevan insists it’s the opposite of free jazz’s “anything-goes” clichés.
“Constraints are freedom. If I tell you, ‘only play harmonics,’ suddenly you’re exploring stuff you’d never try otherwise,” Santistevan says. “Using this vocabulary of signs and gestures, I’m essentially able to take a 14-piece ensemble and make it respond with the responsiveness and articulation of a tight trio reading flat pages.”
Shit Talk
Santistevan’s relationship with Deane began in 2001 through mutual friend Al Faaet, another well-loved New Mexico musician, just as High Mayhem was first starting to organize shows in Santa Fe.
“I went to see Out of Context play at the Georgia O’Keeffe [Museum],” he recalls. “Talking to Dino afterwards, he asked, ‘So what do you think?’ I told him, ‘It was great. I’ll just tell you one thing, though. Your band is good, but... there ain’t no fucking low-end in your band, man!”
This exchange repeated for several shows, Santistevan says, with Dino always teasingly responding: “If you ever know any bass players who are worth a shit, why don’t you send them my way?”
Finally, after one raucous night at the 2004 High Mayhem Festival, Santistevan recalls, Deane called early on a Sunday morning with a directive: “You’ve got 15 minutes. I’ll be at your house in 15 minutes. Pack up your bass…I wanna see what some low-end sounds like.”
Santistevan’s first rehearsal was a trial by fire.
“Dino didn’t explain anything to me for the whole first set,” he says. “I just did my best to make it through. After, he said, ‘That was pretty good, especially since you didn’t know any of the signs.’”
From that moment, Santistevan became a part of Deane’s band, Out of Context. This induction would lead to years of musical collaboration and a profound and ongoing learning experience for Santistevan.
The Folding Space Conduction Ensemble
Today, Santistevan has formed his own group, The Folding Space Conduction Ensemble, to continue the conduction tradition. What began as a separate project has since evolved into a legacy troupe featuring numerous former Out of Context members. For Santistevan, conduction is more than a technique—it’s a philosophy.
“It’s not a hierarchy,” he notes. “I’m just one of the 14. My role is different, but my contribution isn’t more significant.”
It was during one of these rehearsals that longtime Out of Context members and friends of Deane’s Joe Sabella and Katie Harlow presented Santistevan with Dino’s conducting baton.
“They handed it to me and simply said, ‘This is yours.’” Santistevan says..
An LP and a Tribute
The upcoming LP release is a distillation of what could have been a monolithic 15-album box set—a project Dino envisioned before his death. Out of Context left behind a mountain of recordings by the time Deane died, but Santistevan decided to start small, with one album of a standout live performance with a pristine recording.
“As I was listening to it and working on the mixes, I was missing the shit out of the music,” he says. “This is a type of music that doesn’t exist without this vocabulary of musical construction. There is no way that anybody could ever write it or create this musical form without it.”
The project evolved from a tribute to a continuation of an important musical legacy, and The Folding Space Conduction Ensemble is slated to perform a number of Deane compositions at Albuquerque’s Outpost Performance Space this weekend.
“I began to recognize that this is a legacy moment,” Santistevan says. “Here in New Mexico is probably the second deepest legacy of conduction in the world.”
And legacies don’t fade if someone’s willing to keep them alive. In Santistevan’s hands, Dino’s baton continues to conduct new sonic explorations, ensuring this rare musical form persists and evolves for future generations to discover.
The Folding Space Conduction Ensemble/Out of Context EP Release: A Tribute to J.A. “Dino” Deane:
- 3 pm Sunday, April 27. $15-$30
- Outpost Performance Space
- 210 Yale Blvd. SE, Albuquerque,(505) 268-0044
