"Jon Nelson" is a sound collage artist and a radio show host for Some Assembly Required. He "mashes music and found sound — from old movies, laugh tracks, the news — to make what he calls the audio dreamscape of the media age." Jon Nelson has been championing the genre of mashup music for more than 10 years; Some Assembly Required is now Broadcast syndication/syndicated throughout the United States and Canada. 262 episodes were produced from 1999 to 2011.

More Jon Nelson on Wikipedia.

[Most performances, however, will not benefit from marquee billing.] A lot of people are playing for the door [receipts], ... which means they will end up playing for nothing. But the draw is that they have a forum where they can play whatever they want. There are no restrictions.

We try to pair up things you would not likely see on the same program. We want to take categorization out of the whole presentation. If you want to have any kind of future at all, this is how you do it.

The kids really executed the game plan. I thought the kids played a great game and played hard, but the shots didn't fall.

There's a need to provide more organs so those people have a reasonable expectation of getting transplanted in a reasonable amount of time.

It was one of those games that whoever hit shots first was going to get the game. We controlled the tempo and got them frustrated. But they had guys who don't normally step up step up and hit some shots.

Evans makes sounds on the trumpet that are unbelievable. When I heard Nate play, it sounded like electric guitar, and he wasn't using a processor. This is where we have hope, with people who challenge the aesthetics of music. When they get up and play, it's very powerful.

[Though it does a good job of showing off some of the leading talents who work just outside the jazz mainstream, the festival is not particularly bound to the avant-garde canon.] We want to blur all the lines, ... It's easy for people to put things in a box. When events like this are institutional, it's the death of something that could have had some interesting possibilities.

We've played in a lot of (tight) games like this, and I think that's been huge for us. We've come out on the positive end more than the negative, which gives our kids confidence in those situations.