Teddy Kumpel

Joe Jackson once described Teddy Kumpel’s band Nome Sane? as, “Like Radiohead if they were a vaudeville act.” And that pretty much nails the self-described prog/jam/soul that revered guitarist Kumpel – known for his diverse body of work with the likes of Jackson, Rickie Lee Jones, Feist, and Goodie Mob – and his Nome Sane? bandmates deliver on fourth album Of Sound Mind.

An ecstatic marriage of cultured strangeness, relentless melody, and Zappa-esque humor that straddles jazz-rock, funky blues, avant garde, pseudo country, and experimental math rock, Nome Sane? – completed by Matt Miller (Blood, Sweat & Tears, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Stevie Cochran) on drums and bassist/producer Bob Stander(Vinnie Moore, Rickie Byrd) – infuse everything they do with their shared world view and sheer love of doing it.

“I like to explore deep topics and human behavior with a fun slant or a bit of an ‘eyebrow-up’ perspective,” mulled Kumpel from his Brooklyn home. “Or just dadaism, which is also near and dear to my heart.”

Indeed, embracing randomness and chaos is almost a Kumpel core value alongside authenticity, fairness, and fun – all of which permeate Of Sound Mind’s gloriously eclectic, occasionally irreverent 11 tracks. Recorded and mastered by Stander at his Parcheesi Studio in Huntington, NY and produced/mixed by Kumpel, Of Sound Mind is released in August 2026.

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Raised in Port Jefferson, NY in a musical family that constantly played together, Kumpel wrote his first song at age four and by his teens was studying under world-renowned music teacher Richard Rabatin at New York’s Stony Brook School of Music. After attending the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, his first touring gig was with Grammy-nominated jazz vocal group Rare Silk in the mid-1980s.

Having also studied with guitar legends Steve Khan, Dean Brown, and Mick Goodrick, Kumpel moved to New York in 1988 to become the professional musician that he’s been ever since. Highlights include playing on Tim Kubart’s Grammy-winning 2015 album Home; on hitmovie soundtracks including Anchorman and Talladega Nights; and even singing backups with Nine Inch Nails on the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards. Joe Jackson described Kumpel as “the guitarist I always wanted to work with but could never find.” They’ve played together since 2015, including on Jackson’s charting Fool, and Hope and Fury albums.

All along, he’s somehow found time to record and perform his own music, releasing the first Nome Sane? Album (a play on “Know what I’m sayin’”) in 1994 and resurrecting the trio in 2019. In the meantime, his LOOPestra three-piece with a rotating cast of NYC’s finest, centered around Kumpel’s mastery of multi-track looping pedals and funky soundscapes, played over 300 gigs at a Monday night residency at Rockwood Music Hall.

Nome Sane?’s current incarnation came together organically when original member Matt Miller, who’s known Kumpel since their teens, needed a band test his new home studio. “We’d never played together, the three of us, but I just loved how we sounded together,” recalled Kumpel, who also produces and writes for other artists, including indie pop standout Nikki Silva. “They’re really, really different kinds of musicians: Bob is a very adventurous, Zappa-oriented dude, while Matt is more like a Steve Gadd kind of drummer; a ‘drummer’s drummer’.”

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A constant, compulsive songwriter, Kumpel started writing specifically for the revived Nome Sane? and in 2021 their Time Will Shine album appeared, followed by Kevin Wonders of the Squirrel two years later. Always striving for a unique mélange of melodic charm and funky experimentation, Nome Sane? effortlessly channels Kumpel’s love of Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, Jeff Beck, Bill Frisell, Adrian Belew, and John Scofield, with the precision of King Crimson and the refinement of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, skewed with their signature sense of slightly mischievous exuberance.

Written and recorded over two and a half years Of Sound Mind – the title referring to both Nome Sane?’s sanity and their perpetual obsession with sound – finds Kumpel flitting between themes and experiences. Tracked mostly live with only minimal overdubs, it’s the sound of virtuoso players who’ve never lost the joy of creating and performing.

The delicately head-bobbin’ “Non-Stop Crisis” takes a lighthearted look at people who are in a constant state of crisis and steeped in their dramatic history (“A really fun song about some weird sh*t,” according to Kumpel). The deliciously fluid “Ainwhahappanayou,” with its “Ainwhahappanayou/It’s what you do with it” refrain, describes a woman who’s been treated badly and carries the trauma with her until her inner voice reveals that she can change her perspective, which evolves through the song. “Before It Gets Better” traces a hypochondriac navigating his paranoia, the song’s mixed meters and stunning, sweet ‘n sour guitar solo fueling its unsettling mood, while “Old Guy” is a good-natured roast of Stander’s bizarre on-stage banter and audience reactions to his eccentricity.

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Teddy Kumpel and Nome Sane? will release a live-in-the-studio video to accompany Of Sound Mind and will be touring the northeastern U.S. and into Canada. Their sets are truly “live” in the most literal sense, offering audiences a masterfully off-kilter sonic experience that stands alone in an industry increasingly infested with homogeny and technology. And the trio did absolutely everything themselves on their new album, from the first notes composed to the final mastered record.

“A friend of mine once said, ‘your band gives the listener permission to be fully themselves,’ and I kinda like that idea,” the affable Kumpel concluded. “I’d like them to feel like they’re discovering another world and to be excited that there’s original music being played that’s not full of sh*t!”