CMJ: Onstage After a Comrade\'s Loss

Chad Batka for The New York Times Pegasus Warning performed at Cameo Gallery in Brooklyn on Friday evening.

Every so often, even at CMJ, the real world imposes itself, as it did at Cameo Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, late Friday night. On stage was Pegasus Warning, whose frontman is the jazz drummer and sometime performance artist Guillermo E. Brown. The show, he said, was in memory of David S. Ware, “a teacher and a mentor and an experimenter in sound.” Mr. Ware, the widely admired free jazz saxophonist, died on Thursday.

The two men were frequent collaborators. “All the things I do are because he yelled and screamed at me through the saxophone,” Mr. Brown said, describing a relationship of “teaching and battling and sparring.”

Maybe that was responsible for Pegasus Warning's sound, which was the right kind of shambles, full of left turns and quick stops and obvious reference points beaten to a pulp, all delivered with a sense of joy in the process of figuring things out. Think an album by the Time spinning on a turntable during an earthquake. Think an inebriated person doing a Kid Creole impression. And those were just bits of the whole, which veered from punk-funk to '50s rock to no wave to broken R&B and beyond.

Pegasus Warning has a new single, “Nothing2Show,” which is more straightforward and legible than any part of this strategically chaotic performance was. The band also included the drummer Cinque Kemp, a backup singer, Nelson-Mandela Nance, and Robert Lux, doing some combination of effects and synths and noisemaking. At different points, each went above and beyond th eir role, particularly Mr. Nance, who looked as if he were having conniptions, and was singing in a confident voice that was bigger than Mr. Brown's, which felt like the point: expertise and tradition are just one kind of instrument.