Excavated Timbres

By the time he started pursuing a formal education in the avant-garde, John McCowen had already traversed to both ends of the spectrum of rock popularity. During the 2000s, he was singing and screaming in hardcore bands at house shows around his native Carbondale, Illinois. Then, in 2009, he was playing flute and sax in the band Tweak Bird—endowing their ragged sludge punk with jazzy sensibility, a stylistic crossover rarely heard in the genre—while they galvanized arena-sized audiences before Tool got ready to take the stage. From suburban basements to sharing a backstage with one of the most schismatic bands in the world, this range made McCowen’s next career chapter read as quite surprising in comparison. However, going to music school turned out to be more of a practical decision than, on the surface, an unprecedented one: he was a self-taught player and didn’t know how to keep advancing, so he went off to college.