2004 Seattle Improvised Music Festival
Thursday, February 19 · Consolidated Works
500 Boren Avenue N · 8 P.M. · $5-15 sliding scale donationPaul Hession, Wally Shoup & Michael Bisio
Paul Hession photo by Muttonchops
Born in Leeds in 1956, Paul Hession started playing drums at age 15 and is mainly self taught. He was performing almost immediately in Working Mens’ Clubs, a phenomenon in the north of the country. His hunger for deeper musical experiences led him toward jazz and, ultimately, free improvisation. He is relishes the interaction of collective music making, but also responds to the challenge of solo performance. He was awarded Jazz Bursaries by the UK Arts Council in 1986 and 1990, has run music improvisation workshops in many locations since 1985, and in 1996 established Improvised Music Leeds (IML) as an organizational umbrella for workshop/concert activity in his hometown. Hession has played and broadcast in many European countries as well as South, Central, and North America (Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, USA, and Canada). He currently leads the IML Ensemble and plays in Hession/Wilkinson/Fell, trios with Mick Beck and a changing third person, the Anglo Argentine Quartet, and groups with George Haslam plus other players. Other recent collaborators include Joe McPhee, Frode Gjerstad, Tony Bevan, and Borah Bergman. He often collaborates in one-off events and has played with many of the major figures in improvised music as well as dancers and poets.
Bassist/improviser/composer Michael Bisio's life in creative music has led to many wonderful and rich associations. As well as leading his own critically acclaimed ensemble, he is currently a member of Joe McPhee's Bluette and the Joe Giardullo Quartet. Other artists Michael has performed and/or recorded with include Charles Gayle, Sonny Simmons, Marilyn Crispell, Bob Nell, John Tchicai, Diedre Murray, Eyvind Kang, Luc Houtkamp, Rob Blakeslee, Bill Smith, Tani Tabbal, Frank Gratkowski, Stuart Dempster, Barbara Donald, and Saadet Turkoz. In recent years Michael has explored the possibilities of solo bass. Paul de Barros writes of Bisio in Signal to Noise: "For years, free improvisors have explored the tactile aspect of performance, in which the nature of the encounter between the player and the instrument becomes the subject of the music itself. Bisio is one of the few musicians that has managed to meld this high-concept sense of physicality with the soulful charge of jazz. His fiddle-high, scraped overtones create a tangled choir that is impossible to resist; his expressiveness with the bow is unmatched. Having whirled the listener into a transportive state, he gently shows the way out..."
Michael's passion for the music is consistently cited by music critics. In his review of the Joe Giardullo Quartet’s Now Is (Drimala Records), Eduardo Chagas called Michael "...a poet of the contrabass." Writing about MBEK (Meniscus) for Paris Transatlantic, Dan Warburton stated that “Bisio's big sound (imagine a fearsome meta-bassist synthesizing Oscar Pettiford, Charlie Haden, and Peter Kowald and you're on the right track) is the perfect foundation for Kang to build his elaborate constructions on." John Ephland, reviewing Undulations (OmniTone) in Downbeat, writes "In the end, while influences are heard, the sound and approach are clearly Bisio's own.”
Since moving to Seattle in 1985, saxophonist Wally Shoup has been a central figure in the improvisational world. He performed with the New Art Orchestra and Catabatics, and took part in the first Seattle Improvised Music Festival. Since that time, he has helped guide that festival to its present-day status as the longest running free-improvisation festival in North America. A compelling and original saxophonist, Wally is featured in the Encyclopedia of Northwest Music, which notes his ability to "draw crowds from diverse audiences due to his fierce intensity and explorative saxophone performances." He formed Project W in 1994 with cellist Brent Arnold and percussionist Ed Pias, releasing the recording Project W (Apraxia) in 1996 (named a top-ten release in Cadence) and the LP Obliquity (Shrat), which documented their opening set for Sonic Youth in 1998. His alliance with Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) has yielded two recordings: the highly praised Hurricane Floyd (Subliminal) in 2000 and the 2003 Leo Records release Live at Tonic (with Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano). Shoup formed the Wally Shoup Trio in 2001 with bassist Reuben Radding and drummer Bob Rees. The group has played to great acclaim in Seattle and has recently released a critically acclaimed recording, Fusillades and Lamentations, also on London-based Leo Records. Additionally, Wally is a painter of repute in "Outsider Art" circles and is represented in Seattle by the Garde-Rail Gallery. His textural, expressive art merges the sophisticated with the primitive in much the same way as his music, and his art graces a number of his record releases.
2004 Seattle Improvised Music Festival