Craig's list

'Oh my God, I don't know," said keyboardist Craig Taborn, when asked how many working bands could claim him as a member. "Regularly? Let me see." One could hear him counting to himself in a whisper over the phone from his New York City home. "You could say 15 to 20. But if you're talking about the ones that are regularly working right now, I'd have to say seven or eight."

The Golden Valley native will return home with two of them Friday at Walker Art Center. The headliner is the Prezens Quartet, a fiery, improvisational group led by guitarist David Torn (best known for his film soundtracks) that buries blues and funk in caterwauling skronk and textural noise.

"We're really loud live with some sound texture stuff and some ambient and rock things," says Taborn, who plays a Rhodes electric piano, a B3 organ, a Mellotron and some bent circuits. "Yeah, circuit-bending is basically taking any consumer electronic device and rewiring it to do different things and make different sounds," he explained.

By contrast, he will be on acoustic piano for the other band on the bill, Drew Gress' 7 Black Butterflies, which plays an intriguing blend of bebop, avant garde and chamber jazz. Three of the four members of Prezens are also in Butterflies.

"This is kind of a relay race for two tours," Taborn says. "We're out [on tour] with Drew's group and then come to Minneapolis, where we hand off to David's group and go out with him. The Walker is the only place where the groups intersect."

It's the kind of nonstop workload that has prevented Taborn from releasing music under his own name since the critically acclaimed "Junk Magic" in 2004.

"Time is a factor, just because I am doing so many things," he says. "I like a different pace when I'm making a recorded document; I like to home in on things. Otherwise, some things don't have time to season."

The Golden Valley gang

The drummer on "Junk Magic" is David King, timekeeper for almost as many bands as Taborn, including the quirky jazz trio the Bad Plus. King, Taborn and Bad Plus bassist Reid Anderson grew up within blocks of each other in Golden Valley and have known each other since junior high.

It's not surprising that when Taborn and King first got together in their early teens, the music they made was influenced by the cerebral, outlandish jazz-rock of Frank Zappa, or that Taborn's most-Minnesotan band, Gang Font, includes former Hüsker Dü bassist Greg Norton and Happy Apple bandmates King and Eric Fratzke.

"My high school experience happened at the same time all that Replacements and Hüsker Dü stuff was going on, and it had a major part in my sensibilities and possibilities for live music," says Taborn. "Doing Gang Font and playing with Greg Norton gets me back to some things I was always into, but didn't get to do."

Truth be told, Taborn, 38, has been pretty much "into" everything since age 12, when his parents bought him a Moog synthesizer for Christmas.

Yet Taborn gave himself "time to season" after high school. Instead of heading straight to New York City or enrolling at a prestigious music school, he went to the University of Michigan as a liberal arts major, albeit largely because its faculty included such contemporary classical composers as William Bolcom and William Albright. When he received his diploma (a general-studies degree), he'd already appeared on three high-profile records by reedman James Carter.

After the current tour, he's going back out with saxophonist David Binney. Then it will be time to tour again with Chris Potter Underground, which brought him to Minneapolis last month. Susie Ibarra and Roscoe Mitchell also might call.