For tonight's second Underground concert at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts (7:30 p.m.), there's a direct musical bloodline to the first.

A month ago, Austin-bred troubadour Ruthie Foster kicked off the new downstairs, club-style space at the BCPA in fine singer-songwriter style.

For the sophomore session, an old acquaintance of Foster's, also out of the Austin mother lode, is following in her wake: rock-blues guitarist Ian Moore, who calls Foster a "tremendous force" back home.

"I saw one of her first shows when people were still kind of finding her out," reveals Moore, who became a fan at that moment. He would eventually take that respect a step further, sharing a stage with Foster at a music festival.

It's a small world after all? Call it a smooth alignment of the stars - one designed to keep that roots-based Austin vibe percolating through the Twin Cities.

For the record, that vibe was further energized recently by another of Moore's favorite Austin sons, James McMurtry, who played a late-summer New Lafayette Club gig and is venerated by Moore as a master of his singer-songwriter domain, "head and shoulders above the rest of us."

Moore, 40, is no slouch himself in that regard: With a musical history that includes touring with Joe Ely and issuing a series of eclectic albums over the past 15 years, he's a seasoned musician whose aesthetic can't be boiled down to an easy sound byte.

His guitar style has been compared to the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughan, while his songwriting betrays the influences of everyone from the Beatles to the Byrds to Curtis Mayfield to Jimmy Cliff.

Though Moore has relocated from Austin to the Seattle area, he carries his Austin roots with him wherever he goes, and, moreover, still finds himself in the city of his dreams "at least once a month or more."

In fact, en route to his Bloomington concert, he noted that he would be traveling from Seattle to Austin "to pick up the guys in the band."

With no small degree of irony, Moore notes that "I'm probably a more active part of the community and more visible now than when I lived there. When I lived in Austin, I was touring so much that when I'd get home, I was in shellshock and hiding out in the house."

The Berkeley, Calif.-born Moore began his musical journey playing the violin as a child, but turned to the guitar when a wrist problem cramped his style.

His musical journey took him to Austin, where he linked up with Joe Ely, then fronted several of his bands, including The Ian Moore Band and Moment's Notice.

An Ian Moore album can include everything from one of his own acutely observed reveries like "Closer" (a recollection of the times he stole his dad's car as a 15-year-old, all the better to

drive to Mexico to be closer to his homeopathic girlfriend) to reinvented covers of a lesser-known Beatles song like "Hey Bulldog."

His current CD, "To Be Loved," was recorded at his own home studio on Vashon Island in the Puget Sound area of Seattle. Literally a do-it-yourself album, Moore not only recorded it at home, he built all the equipment from scratch, from mikes to preamps to compressors.

"A lot of this record to me is exploring the sonic aspects of recording and how to make these different sounds that I've always loved."

To that do-it-yourself end, he describes his live entourage as being "assembled as a kind of Willie Nelson-family lite," with musicians planted around the country who can pitch in or sit in when duty or simply the urge calls.

Informed that he's only the second performer in the new BCPA space, Moore laughs, and says he tends to be the go-to guy when venues want to break in new spaces or try new things.

"I'm the guy people call when there's a yoga studio wanting someone to play," he says, which, by the way, is a true story. "Why not?"

Though he routinely plays standard concert venues, Moore expresses an affinity for the yoga studios and, in the BCPA's case, "downstairs" performing spaces of the world.

"People seem to be really listening when you do these spaces," he says, as opposed to coming to a club "just wanting to get drunk."

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At a glance

What: Ian Moore

When: 7:30 tonight

Where: The Underground at Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts, 110 E. Mulberry St.

Tickets: $20.50

Box office number: (866) 686-9541