17th SEATTLE IMPROVISED MUSIC FESTIVAL
Carla Kihlstedt & Shahzad Ismaily
Sunday, June 30 · Polestar Music Gallery · 1412 18th Ave. at E Union · 8 PM · $10
Photo courtesy of Shkin.com
Carla Kihlstedt studied classical violin at the Peabody, San Francisco, and Oberlin conservatories and went on to win prestigious awards and performance invitations in that world before settling in the Bay Area in the mid-1990s to venture in altogether different directions in world-pop/art-rock, new-music composition and performance, and improvisation. Overall, she is perhaps best known as a violinist and singer with the Oakland-based art-rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, which makes use of both traditional and improvised instruments, and as a founding member of the Tin Hat Trio, where she and her accordionist and guitarist partners play quasi-composed, quasi-improvised music that seamlessly merges elements of folk, jazz, world, and new musics. At Phillip Glass's new-music series, MATA, as well as in various Bay Area contemporary-music series, she has performed many commissions and compositions of her own. She has played on albums by Ben Goldberg, Mr. Bungle, and the Grassy Knoll, and on Tom Waits's soundtrack for the Academy Award–winning short film Bunny. She has collaborated often with choreographer Joe Kreiter, and has also worked as a graphic designer and illustrator. For fans of improvised music and out-jazz, however, the extraordinarily versatile, dynamic, and dramatic violinist is equally acclaimed as a composer and performer who has worked with the likes of Fred Frith, John Schott, Ben Goldberg, Eugene Chadbourne, John Zorn, and members of the fertile milieus in the Bay Area around the ROVA saxophone quartet and the new-music program at Mills College.
Photo courtesy of Shkin.com
Shahzad Ismaily performs on bass and electronics, and has credentials that suit him perfectly to the eclecticism of Carla Kihlstedt. A musician, engineer, producer, biochemistry professor, computer programmer, and community activist, he is self-taught on many musical instruments. Living in New York and recently spending time in Seattle, he has appeared and recorded with the likes of Rage Against the Machine, drummer Billy Higgins, violinists Charlie Burnham and Eyvind Kang, cornetist Graham Haynes, bassist Kato Hideki, and klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer. His musical experience is, in fact, as diverse as his biography. He has, for example, been the drummer for the septet Barbez in which, as its own publicity puts it, "old world Russian cabaret collides with Bartok and the Residents in this Brooklyn-based punk chamber ensemble." With Andy McGraw, he comprises the looping duo Catoven, in which he plays bass, guitar, Moogs, Casio keyboards, vocals, baby pianos, and more.
For this performance,Shahzad Ismaily will utilize sound software to process Carla Kihlstedt's violin improvisations in real time.
17th Seattle Improvised Music Festival