MR. BVNGLE (w/ BAR McKINNON & DANNY HEIFETZ) – Welcome Back / 24000 Baci / Territory | Live @ Festival Hall, Melbourne (2024)

Clinton “Bär” McKinnon (born 1969) is an American musician, perhaps best known for being a saxophonist in the San Francisco-based band Mr. Bungle. Bär, pronounced “bear”, is a childhood nickname given to him by his older sisters. In 1989, Bär joined Mr. Bungle and studied music at Humboldt State University, where he met Trevor Dunn and Trey Spruance. His primary instrument is the saxophone, and he plays a number of other instruments, including flute, keyboards, guitar, drums, percussion, bass, and other assorted woodwinds.

Bär was a member of Mr. Bungle from 1989 to their disbandment in 2000 and has written and performed with Secret Chiefs 3, Dieselhed, and Humboldt County hip hop/reggae/rock fusion band Lakota. He has also appeared on the Melt-Banana album Charlie, on the Carl Hancock Rux record Rux Revue, on the Ray’s Vast Basement disc On the Banks of the Time, on Eyvind Kang’s The Story of Iceland, and the Barefoot Hockey Goalie album One Part Thomas Edison. Bär McKinnon performs around Melbourne with his band Umläut and contributes to a remote supergroup formed in 2020 by the name of High Castle Teleorkestra.

Umlaut (also stylized as Umläut) is an experimental progressive band based out of Melbourne, Australia. It is the culmination of years of work for McKinnon. Umlaut’s eclectic musical stylings reside in the same vein as McKinnon’s previous bands, Mr. Bungle and Secret Chiefs 3—injecting an energetic and whimsical blend of pop, jazz, avant-garde metal, symphonic atmosphere, and electronica into its sound.

Danny Heifetz (born 1964) is an American musician who is perhaps best known for being the drummer for American experimental rock group, Mr. Bungle from 1989, until their disbandment in 2000. Heifetz also plays trumpet, guitar, bass and piano and currently teaches music lessons in Sydney, Australia.

He is the grandson of Jascha Heifetz (1901–1987), a Jewish-Russian-American violinist, widely regarded as one of the greatest violinists of all time. Born in Vilnius, he was soon recognized as a child prodigy and was trained in the Russian classical violin style in St. Petersburg. Accompanying his parents to escape the violence of the Russian Revolution, he moved to the United States as a teenager, where his Carnegie Hall debut was rapturously received. Fritz Kreisler, another leading violinist of the twentieth century, said after hearing Heifetz’s debut, “We might as well take our fiddles and break them across our knees.”