AS THE CELLIST in Kronos Quartet, Joan Jeanrenaud played everything but own music. For 20 years she plucked and bowed a repertoire that set new standards for modern classical ensembles. Kronos went beyond even the obvious late-20th-century radicals – Harrison, Reich, Adams – to play music by Bo Diddley, Bill Evans, Muhal Richard Abrams, Thomas Mapfumo, Huun-Huur-Tu, and others. But no Jeanrenaud.

That was rectified, not by Kronos (Jeanrenaud left the ensemble in 1999) but by the cellist herself, at this year's Other Minds, the 10th anniversary of the international music festival that honors composers of almost every stripe, brings them together for a weeklong residency during which they share and compare ideas, and presents them to an audience obviously hungry for new sounds ("obviously," because this year's three concerts, March 4 through 6 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, all sold out). O.M. executive and artistic director Charles Amirkhanian heard Jeanrenaud's 2001 debut solo CD, Metamorphosis (New Albion), and that was enough for him to book her and composer Mark Grey. The Tennessee-born longtime San Franciscan came through with two splendid performances: the premieres of Grey's Sands of Time, for cello, prerecorded cello, and live digital signal processing; and her own Hommage, for cello and live electronics.

These weren't Jeanrenaud's first solo appearances since leaving Kronos. She has presented dramatic cello-centric performance pieces, including Ice Cello and Inbetween, and has been featured out front with the National Symphony of Ireland and the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. Nor was Hommage her first publicly performed original piece; that honor goes to the structured improvisation she played at Rova Saxophone Quartet's Music on the Mountain Concert in 1999. But the invitation to participate in Other Minds, with its ever heightening profile and growing audience, boosted Jeanrenaud in her own right toward the more "mainstream maverick" status Kronos had acquired.

In a festival in which several portions of the nightly programs tested the audiences' attention spans, as well as their ability to take in jarring stylistic juxtapositions (Thursday's opening night included modern variations on Armenian folk music, a contemporary flute concerto, and Jon Raskin's hour-long piece for Rova and six Asian instrumentalists), Jeanrenaud's performances clocked in at well under 20 minutes each. Both she and Grey demonstrated a welcome sense of knowing to stop writing or playing when the piece says its done. A sound engineer who has worked extensively with Kronos and wrote "Blood Red" for Jeanrenaud's Metamorphosis, Grey conceived of Sands of Time as a study of rhythmic and harmonic contrasts. During its performance Friday night, he used granular synthesis electronics that allowed him to morph as little as a single note into a virtual orchestra, and while the processed effects sometimes overwhelmed the "real" playing, they gave Jeanrenaud's live cello, played against a three-cello recorded track, a pleasing oceanic dimension.

The Frippertronic-like machinations felt more balanced the next night when Jeanrenaud premiered her tribute to three great influences on her post-Kronos career: Terry Riley, Nubian composer and oud master Hamza el Din, and Rova's Larry Ochs. (Jeanrenaud's working relationship with saxophonist Ochs and koto and electronics player Miya Masaoka is documented on a brilliant new trio CD, Fly, Fly, Fly.) With its repeated minimalist motifs, drones, bracing pizzicato passages, subtle harmonics and overtones, and long melodic lines, Hommage deftly incorporated elements from all three improvising composers. And by using foot pedals and switch boxes to control looping and delay effects, Jeanrenaud was able to instantaneously generate compelling on-the-spot contexts for her in-the-moment soloing, which included rapturous and melancholic melodies as well as staccato attacks reminiscent of the way a blues guitarist "worries" the strings. Her command of the cello was impeccable, but more thrilling was the passionate relationship with the instrument she now manifests.