Fire Museum Presents celebrates its 15th anniversary with a free concert series

On Friday, Philadelphia jazz piano great Dave Burrell sat at the keyboard in Philadelphia Argentine Tango School in Kensington and began an hourlong solo performance with a captivating rendition of John Coltrane's "Naima" that became alternately a meditation, abstraction, contemplation, corruption, and explosion of the classic ballad.

Less than 24 hours later, the New York trio Earth Tongues turned the same mirror-lined dance space into a transfixing sonic environment. Carlo Costa scraped stone against tile atop his snare drum while Dan Peck knocked resonant booms from the bell of his tuba. Joe Moffett clacked his trumpet keys while using a sheet of aluminum foil to elicit static squalls from a cassette player. And it was all accompanied by the rush of traffic on the snow-dampened street outside.

These two very different performances served as an appropriately wide-ranging and adventurous kickoff to the 15th anniversary celebration of Fire Museum Presents, the concert presenter operating in Philadelphia for nearly a decade. Curator Steven Tobin launched the series and an accompanying, now-dormant, record label in the Bay Area in 2001 before switching coasts six years later. Since then, he's brought a dizzyingly eclectic range of artists spanning free jazz, experimental noise, world music, and psychedelic rock - many of them bleeding over from one category to another - to a variety of spaces around the city.

"I guess I could come up with some kind of grand manifesto," Tobin said with a shrug last week between bites of vegetarian dan dan noodles in Chinatown. "But the overarching theme is really just, 'If I wasn't the person putting the shows together, who would I really like to see?' "

The diversity that follows from that approach will be fully on display throughout the remainder of Fire Museum's 15th anniversary series. All anniversary events are free.

On Sunday, a four-night run at the Rotunda will begin with a concert by Guinean guitarist Mamady Kouyaté, a former member of the famed West African group Bembeya Jazz, and his group the Mandingo Ambassadors.

The series continues over the next three nights with shows by singer Laurie Amat, a longtime collaborator with legendarily mysterious group the Residents; the fire-breathing free-jazz duo of drummer Chris Corsano and saxophonist Paul Flaherty, coincidentally celebrating the 15th anniversary of their own collaboration; and the virtuosically expansive duo of saxophonist Travis Laplante and trumpeter Peter Evans. The series will conclude in May with a performance by Middle Eastern-influenced multi-instrumentalist Sam Shalabi and Iraqi American trumpeter/santur player Amir ElSaffar, who led a phenomenal large ensemble concert at the Kimmel Center last weekend.

Though last week's pair of concerts officially inaugurated the Philly festivities, the anniversary celebration was officially launched in February with a Nadaswaram Kacheri in Kerala, India: a performance of traditional Carnatic music meant to mark an auspicious occasion. Tobin, whose day job is with a pharmaceutical company, goes to India semiregularly because his wife's mother lives there.

"It might be laying it on thick to say that 15 years of doing this is pretty auspicious," Tobin said. "But it's celebratory music and it was a great mix of people that lived in the neighborhood, people that came from afar, and tourists that were just walking by."

When Fire Museum began on the West Coast a decade and a half ago, its mission was to raise money for a variety of causes. Recipients ranged from the global, including organizations such as the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan and the War Resisters League, to the hyper-local, including one show that raised money for Tobin's cat's veterinary bills.

The series takes its name from a dream his wife, Leah Fenimore, had.

At first, Tobin presented no more than four shows a year, but after his move to Philadelphia, the pace accelerated to the point where he now averages four to five a month. Finding consistent homes for the series, especially in Tobin's rapidly gentrifying Fishtown neighborhood, has been a challenge, to the point where he joked about offering tours of past venues. "Here's the vape shop where Highwire Gallery used to be," he said, waving his arm with a halfhearted chuckle, "and here's the architect's office where First Banana used to be."

Ultimately, by relying on his own divergent tastes, Tobin hopes to lead audiences to new discoveries wherever they happen to take place.

With this celebration, he said, "There's always the hope that people other than the usual crowd can find out about things they'd be interested in. It's always great when you can discover a favorite player that you may or may not have ever found out about otherwise."

Fire Museum Presents 15th Anniversary, Sunday-Wednesday, all events 8 p.m., the Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St. Free. museumfire.com/events.