From Artful Noise to an Album With a Buzz

Mark “Stew” Stewart was harboring a dirty little secret in the early ‘90s. After a decade of creating high-minded, free-form sounds, banging trash cans and ground glass into sonic scrawls in the name of art, he was, behind closed doors, crafting lowly little pop songs.

It wasn’t easy to finally reveal his penchant for Burt Bacharach and the Beatles--a passion that’s obvious on “Post Minstrel Syndrome,” the 1997 debut album by his band the Negro Problem.

“I was respected by my avant-garde music friends,” says Stewart, 36, sitting with his bandmates in a Los Feliz coffeehouse, where a friend’s painting hanging on the wall serves as a reminder of his artier days.

“They had no idea that at home what I really was doing on my four-track wasn’t grinding Coke bottles against Plexiglas,” he continues. “I was making actual songs. When I told those people that I wanted to do pop, it was almost like coming out--I was a closet pop freak.”

Stewart’s garb--a black ‘60s-style pea coat and a fluffy white cap--reflects the two sides of the Negro Problem’s musical vision: snappy, tailored pop undercut with an outlandish, anything-goes freakiness.

Though “Post Minstrel Syndrome” has sold a scant 4,000 copies on Stewart’s tiny Aerial Flipout label, the band has built a local following, and the album landed on a number of critics’ year-end lists. A strong seller at area record stores, “Post Minstrel” was praised by Request magazine for its “beautifully built grown-up pop constructions that alternately soothe and disturb.”

Those dual goals stem from the band’s diverse noise and pop roots. Drummer Charles Pagano, 40, a former student of the Ornette Coleman-founded Creative Music Studio, met Stewart when he went to hear him play his sound collages at the LACE gallery. Stewart had just returned from Berlin, where he performed alongside such bands as the industrial group Einsturzende Neubauten at clubs so extreme they would sometimes charge patrons a fee for leaving before a set was over.

At the time, Pagano was playing jazz, blues and Top 40 standards at clubs and weddings. “I thought, ‘Ah, an opportunity to get back into some insanity,’ ” says Pagano, who formed the Negro Problem with Stewart--who sings lead and plays guitar--in 1995. The current lineup is completed by flutist Lisa Jenio, 35, and bassist Heidi Rodewald, 38.

The group chose a name intended to ring with absurdity and get a little attention, and indeed it was a source of some consternation for a few club owners when the band began playing gigs three years ago.

Stewart and the rest of the Negro Problem don’t mind that the name receives both negative and positive response.

“Irony doesn’t really work in this country,” says Stewart, who is more bothered that some people are surprised that a black man is playing pop music.

“I hate that whole distinction of ‘white music,’ ‘black music,’ ” says Stewart, leaning over his table. “What is it when the Beatles cover Chuck Berry? Why is it that Mick Jagger can sing the blues badly for like 3,000 years? The songs I’m doing, they come out of Western music, and I have as much Bach in me as James Brown.”

* The Negro Problem plays tonight at 9 at Jacks Sugar Shack, 1707 N. Vine St., $5. (213) 466-7005.