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Donald Rubinstein is in a groove these days.

For a jazzy kind of musician, that's usually a given. For a man branching out into art and multiple collaborations, it's an essential part of keeping all the balls in the air.

"I've been working on so many things, and I feel real comfortable shooting from the hip on these projects," Rubinstein said. "For some reason, I feel very comfortable and organized."

Rubinstein's varied talents will be on display this weekend in Santa Fe, with a show of his artwork at Linda Durham Gallery and a multimedia extravaganza at the Center for Contemporary Arts.

At the CCA show — called "Cool-Aberrations in Art, Music and Film" — his art will be on display, and he'll perform in concert Saturday night. Then on Sunday, he'll talk about film scores before they show the 1977 film "Martin," the George Romero thriller for which he penned the music.

Genre-hopping "has been a vein in who I am all these years," Rubinstein said. "I've just always had this thing for reaching really far into what I'm doing."

He started out with classical aspirations, a graduate of the Berklee College of Music in Boston. One of his classmates was Bill Frisell, the jazz/rock guitarist who continues to be a collaborator to this day.

Not long out of school, he made a splash in 1977 with the score for "Martin." He went on to contribute to Romero's "Knightriders" in 1981, and he wrote the score for the zombie auteur's "Bruiser" in 2000.

In the liner notes to the CD release of the "Martin" soundtrack, Romero writes: "The first time I heard the haunting, lovely-while-tragic main theme, I knew that it was not only a composer who had entered my life, but a kindred spirit." Romero adds, "We remain kin. More than friends. Brothers."

On the jacket, noted jazz critic Gary Giddins calls the "Martin" music "a showcase for Donald Rubinstein's jazz chops."

"Musically, I've just come up with an incredible number of influences," Rubinstein said, citing Frisell first.

A mutual friend played Rubinstein's music for John Densmore, and the former Doors drummer put in a call to Santa Fe. Rubinstein and Densmore collaborated on music for the film "Pollock." (The star of that film is another old friend, Ed Harris.) The music didn't make it into the final cut of the movie, but the work is being prepared for CD release.

Densmore is expected to join Rubinstein in concert Saturday, along with country outlaw Terry Allen, local guitarist Larry Mitchell and percussionist Hani Naser.

"I'm just in a good space," Rubinstein said. "I worked a long time on 'Circus Boy' (his latest disc) and (the upcoming) 'Take the Boy Away,' which is an avant-garde rock album."

As if art and music aren't enough, Rubinstein expects to debut this weekend as a filmmaker. His five-minute short "Tales From the Edge," based on his drawings, will play at the CCA, he said.

In recent years, he has been spending more time on his art.

"I've always been drawing on and off for years. It's just been a pleasure for me," he said. "So many of my friends are artists, and I just enjoyed their company, because it's a respite from music. It's a quieter world."

As it happens, late-night noodlings led to a series of characters, often accompanied by words or captions.

"I just started drawing these things on my computer after my wife decided there would be no more TV in the bedroom," he said.

The figures call to mind monsters or the characters found in the drawings of New Yorker magazine legend Saul Steinberg, with Rubinstein toying with designs and mixing media.

He struggles to describe the characters.

"People seem to find them — they're kind of sophisticated in some ways. But they seem very unsophisticated when you first see them."

It's a matter of putting what's in his head on paper (or on the screen).

"A lot of my work comes out of my mind," Rubinstein said. "The way my mind works is I plan a lot of different things and come up with a concept."

The characters and the messages they carry "are little moments, but they speak to our culture," he said.

"I have a fondness for all the weakness in all of us and a fondness for the brokenness in all of us. And the exuberance."

Rubinstein has a sculpture/music piece with noted artist Kiki Smith now on display at the Whitney Museum in New York. The two also had a show together in 2004 at the Museum of Modern Art. That piece, "Seed," will be featured in Santa Fe.

Another recent collaboration — we're back to music and film — was with Santa Fe filmmakers Mary Feidt and Natalie Goldberg, who asked Rubinstein to do the music for "Tangled Up in Bob," a documentary about Bob Dylan's hometown, Hibbing, Minn.

The filmmakers couldn't get the rights to original Dylan music, and some viewers might be tricked at first by Rubinstein's tunes, which he sings in a gravelly voice. The songs themselves, when you hear them on the soundtrack CD, have a raw, John Cale feel to them but with a haunting, Dylanesque tone.

He said he and the filmmakers agreed that the movie wouldn't be about Dylan's music but more about the town he grew up in.

"I tried to be true to the atmosphere," he said.

Rubinstein says he has held few 9-to-5 jobs. "And when I had them, I got fired from them with regularity." Even playing in bars, like most musicians do, has proved to be tricky. "I get fired from them, too," he said.

Rubinstein says that working across a broad palette of media and genres satisfies his different sides.

"I do like being mainstream," he said. "I mean, 'Tangled Up in Bob' is very straightforward. I just have other parts of me that flare out in different directions.

"I love both. I love beautiful music. I love melodies. But I love busting in all directions, too."