In this age of distress, disease and discord, how welcome to encounter a composer both mellow and inventive. He was an innovator and modernist, not in harmonies, but rather in building strangely compatible  pairings of live and canned sounds.

The posthumous tribute by SF Performances provided an all-Ingram Marshall concert combining live musicians with electronic input (or, as he’d have called it, with tape). The career of Marshall (1942-2022) the sometime mystic has spilled over both coasts with commitments at both CalArts and Yale.

The unusual conglomerate event brought together accomplished professionals like pianist Sarah Cahill along with advanced students at the S.F. Conservatory of Music (SFCM). There was nothing amateurish about this April 15 concert. Its highlight, both as work and performance, was “Fog Tropes,” Marshall’s very San Francisco piece for brass sextet. Instead of bar lines, there are surges of rich, sustained lower tones on horn, trombone and trumpet in glorious resonance, abetted by electronics. If you also heard gulls and foghorns, welcome to the Bay Area. The effect was somewhere between Debussy, Wagner’s “Rheingold” and Richard Strauss. The conductor Edwin Outwater cited Marshall’s “whimsey and wit” in this, his best-known piece.

            The processed guitar sound, which enabled music to continue even when Ben Verdery paused in his performance of “Soe-pa,”  touched on Tibetan influences as well as Bach quotes, much as the orchestral “Flow” for over a dozen players led by John Adams delved into the Sanskrit idea of Kali (a book-length foray into Kali, Tibetan music and Bach would be a worthy follow-up, given the time and space).

            For sheer evocative music, nothing topped the play of veteran pianist and music annotator Sarah Cahill  in “Authentic Presence.” Her nimble play and genteel touch I and most of the audience at Herbst Theatre found heavenly, with the applause still ringing in my ears.

            And, by the end of the evening, all could feel, well, totally mellow.

As for disease, distress, discord, he already retorted in 2001, “Composers, poets and artists always feel useless in the wake of calamity, we are not firemen; we are not philanthropists or inspirational speakers. But I think it is the tragic and calamitous in life that we try to make sense of, and this is the stuff of our lives as artists.” (From the New York Times)

            AN ALL-MARSHALL CONCERT TRIBUTE, auspices of S.F. Performances April 15, Herbst Theatre, San Francisco. For SFP info: (415) 392-2545, or go online. www.sfperformances.org