There seems to be a tradition in early baroque and classical music of taking another composer’s piece and rewriting it to demonstrate your superior writing, deriving masterful variations from the other composer’s weaker theme. The gesture can be flattering or insulting, a respectful tribute or machismo in a powdered wig. We see it in its polite form in Bach’s Musical Offering, where Bach composes a clever, showy masterpiece based on a challenge and melody issued to him by Frederick II.

If Illinois is Renaissance Italy, Urbana’s Paul Kotheimer is the Leonardo Da Vinci of the home studio. Originally from Chicago, he’s been making his home in Urbana for nearly fifteen years. A little story about Paul: once a local songwriter told Paul that she was interested in starting a collective of local musicians. Surprised, Paul responded that he had been acting, for years, as if there already were a collective of local musicians. He helps out everywhere, often for free: WEFT, Red Herring, The Channing-Murray, people’s weddings, loaning equipment, setting up PAs, playing for something, nothing, anything, nowhere somewhere anywhere, in the acoustic nightmare of local cafes, 6th and Green late Friday night, crooning to drunk jocks, singing louder than the MTD Green line, playing the WEFT sessions, having his music mixed through a blender, recording the Guerilla Parlor Ensemble, helping Beezus, helping me. Hoping somebody will occasionally toss the words “thank you” into his guitar case. Some guy from Herring Boys still hasn’t paid Paul for the Rickenbacker bass he took.