In the three course meal of headliners at the 2025 Syracuse Jazz Fest, Todd Rundgren is the tart dessert: a surprising, pleasantly acidic, and endlessly stimulating musical mind.
Rundgren’s bio describes him as “a pop savant who [has] fastidiously avoided easy categorization throughout the course of his career” and I was excited to see what version of Rundgren would show up: the 70’s soft rock pop star behind hits like I Saw the Light and Hello It’s Me, the music technologist who explored synthesizers with his band, Utopia, or the experimental mad scientist who used the E-Mu Emulator to create a rock album, 1985’s A Cappella, using only manipulated samples of his voice.
