For some performers, music is an art. For some it's a job. And for others, it's just a way to wind down. Local musician Alexander Bogs doesn't quite fit into any of those categories. He has become his music, crafting an entirely new persona dedicated to the performing arts.

But he wasn't always Bogs. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Sunset Park, Bogs, then Alex Talavera, shed his original identity, and name, years ago. For the past 15 years he has been living and performing as A. Bogs, a moniker that captures the eccentricity of the man and his music.

Bogs is the front man - and sometimes only man - of Rochester-based folk circus Bogs Visionary Orchestra. He has performed at museums and coffee shops, colleges and music halls, spreading his blend of musical and visual art. The music is folk at its core, driven and anchored by Bogs's banjo, guitar, and vocals. Other instruments may swirl around the banjo and Bogs's equally twangy vocals, but that's the center of the storm. It sounds like a higher-pitched William Elliott Whitmore, and Bogs is versatile enough to play through faster alt-country ditties and slower street-side performer ballads alike.

The orchestra behind Bogs is ever changing, sometimes squeezing up to eight people on stage. The current line-up includes Reilly Soloman Taylor-Cook on bass, Paul Scota on drums, and Tom Montagliano on guitar. It's part music and part musical theater, all combining into something that is neither art nor music singularly, but somehow both at the same time.

"The fact that there's an element of performance art-theater, it allows me to venture off in terms of sound," Bogs says. "Where at one point in the performance, it can sound like noise, and another part of the performance it can sound like hillbilly mixed with rock."

Prior to taking on his new identity, Bogs was an art teacher, helping students craft and shape their own artistic ideas. But he discovered that teaching was not his true calling; he struggled working under the idea that art had to be good or bad, this way or that way. He disliked that it had to be categorized, instead of something more organic.

"I wanted to make art, not teach it," Bogs says. "I saw it as a very simple idea. Make a sound, I could repeat that sound, I could change it, I could record, it, and I could do something else with the recording. I was thinking about it more kind of in a conceptual way, but also in a very basic way. And that's how I started making music."

For Bogs the music was a changing point, and it provided a new canvas onto which he could paint his creative energy. "I've been Bogs now for probably close to 15 years," he says. "So when I committed to that ID I was pretty serious about sticking to it.... It was more out of necessity, I think. I created this A. Bogs character because I felt the need to start over. Maybe to have a new playing field, I guess."

With no formal music training, Bogs picked up the banjo and guitar and starting doing what felt right to him. No need to worry if the art or music was good or bad, with his new persona he became a channel of, as he puts it, "unbridled creativity." He could be a musical artist, and simply create.

"When I have an idea to do something, I feel like I can push through more as that character," he says.

But why the need for a character? For Bogs, personal relationships can strain and derail the creation of live music, such as when musicians stop between songs to give personal facts about their lives or wave to their family or friends in the crowd.

"In a way that relationship kind of interrupts the experience of the art," he says. "Having this character kind of allows me to push some of those boundaries of performance and not get stuck doing a certain formula."

Bogs Visionary Orchestra shows are far from formulaic. Sculptures and other visual art forms are all at home on the stage. So is poetry, or gaps in the music, where Bogs has done everything from laying on the stage to listen to the music he just played, or to go into the crowd to give flowers to audience members. He's had the audience write their own lyrics to songs, and he's stopped concerts to connect with audience members on a more personal level to tell them that they too are creative people.

"There are very interesting and unplanned things that happened that for me confirmed the power of saying, ‘Hey, you're creative too. You're just not here to watch me do this performance, actually. You know, this is a shared experience,'" Bogs says.

Most importantly though, is Bogs's take-home message, be it through art or music: free the outsider within. Not so much a teacher, but more like a tour guide, Bogs has a goal to help people rediscover those childlike expressions of self and identity, and to show his audiences that they too can create and be artists.

"It's about creating maybe a world, or a moment, where they can exist as creative people while I am performing in front of them," he says.

Bogs Visionary Orchestra

w/My Brightest Diamond (solo), Mikaela Davis

Saturday, January 14

Bug Jar, 219 Monroe Ave.

9 p.m. | $10-$12 | 454-2966, bugjar.com