Jeffrey Allport
percussionVancouver-based percussionist Jeffrey Allport approaches the physical nature of his chosen instrument through a variety of preparations and implements to liberate a unique palette of sounds. Respecting each carefully extracted tone, thump and scrape in addition to the silence from which they are borne, his exploratory improvisations inhabit minute sound worlds; eschewing the grand gesture.
In addition to solo work, Allport has enjoyed a lengthy collaboration with Tim Olive releasing three CD's since 1998. They have also toured in Canada, the United States, Western Europe and Japan. Frequently participating in once-only groupings has led him to performing and recording with a wide variety of improvisers. Past collaborators have included saxophonist John Butcher, trumpeters Axel Dörner and Greg Kelley, as well as harpist Rhodri Davies.
Jason E Anderson
http://pathoftheelk.comJason E Anderson is a sound and visual artist from Seattle. His work includes live performances, recorded sound works, sound installations, graphic art, collage and video works. Anderson's recorded work and live performances combine a sense of logical and intuitive approaches to music improvisation and experimentation. Through the use of electronically generated, processed and natural sound, his work fits into the more abstract realm of electronic music. He performs with guitar, sampler, computer and/or turntable. In 2005, he founded the label make jet silent.
As an organizer, he is involved with No West and produces the Quiet sound series and 12 Hour Play. He is currently working on his first solo record, in addition to creating a multi-disciplinary art project known as path of the elk.
Kyle Bruckmann
oboe, English hornhttp://www.kylebruckmann.com
With a history of conservatory training gone awry, oboist and electronic musician Kyle Bruckmann combines the rigorous discipline of a classical foundation with raucous sensibilities more indebted to punk's aftermath in a dizzying variety of artistic endeavors. He has performed throughout the U.S. and Europe as a composer, an interpreter, and an improviser and has appeared on more than 30 albums of various genres.
Long-term affiliations include EKG, an electroacoustic duo with Ernst Karel, and the experimental "rock" monstrosity Lozenge. Bruckmann's quintet Wrack performs original compositions drawing equally from the traditions of contemporary jazz and classical modernism, cultivating an "ability to combine turned-up flame with clear-headed attention to texture and space" (Jason Bivins, Dusted Magazine). As a member of the Bay Area new music collective sfSound and of Gene Coleman's Chicago-based Ensemble Noamnesia, he has performed works by composers including Andriessen, Berio, Braxton, Cage, Cardew, Crumb, Feldman, Goldstein, Ives, Penderecki, Satie, Sciarrino, Stockhausen, Tenney, Webern, Xenakis, and Yoshihide.
Upon moving to San Francisco in 2003, he joined forces with sfSound and with Quinteto Latino, a wind quintet selected for the San Francisco Symphony's 2005-2006 Adventures in Music educational program. He has since performed with the SFSO and the regional symphony orchestras of Berkeley, Santa Rosa, Marin, Napa Valley, Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Jose and accompanied productions by Golden Gate Opera, Pocket Opera, and Oakland Opera Theater. He has meanwhile become firmly enmeshed in the vibrant local improvised music community, with frequent co-conspirators including Liz Albee, David Bithell, Ernesto Diaz-Infante, Matt Ingalls, John Ingle, Christopher Jones, Aurora Josephson, Jacob Lindsay, David Michalak, Tom Nunn, Tim Perkis, Dan Plonsey, John Shiurba, Karen Stackpole, Jon Raskin, Gino Robair, Scott Rosenberg, and Toyoji Tomita. Current Bay Area working groups include Shudder (with Lance Grabmiller and Phillip Greenlief) and Pink Mountain (an outrock band with an album available on Frenetic Records).
From 1996 until his westward relocation, he was a fixture in multiple sectors of Chicago's thriving experimental music scene. While teaching and free-lancing as an orchestral musician, he collaborated regularly with many of the city's most creative improvisers and sound artists, including Jason Ajemian, Jim Baker, Jeb Bishop, Olivia Block, Tim Daisy, Guillermo Gregorio, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Robbie Hunsinger, Bob Marsh, Weasel Walter, and Michael Zerang. Beyond Lozenge, his underground rock misadventures also led to a short stint in the volatile My Name is Rar-Rar (touring in support of The Locust) and to entanglements with neo-no-wave stalwarts Cheer-Accident and Bobby Conn.
In the course of his travels, Bruckmann has shared the stage repeatedly with a cast of improvisers including Allesandro Bosetti, Tom Carter, Audrey Chen, Christopher Cogburn, David Dove, Jeremy Drake, Harris Eisenstadt, Bryan Eubanks, Chris Forsyth, Jeff Gburek, Gunda Gottschalk, Boris Hauf, Chris Heenan, Guiseppe Ielasi, James Ilgenfritz, Greg Kelley, Larry Marotta, Tatsuya Nakatani, Kurt Newman, Polwechsel, Bhob Rainey, Vic Rawlings, David Rothbaum, Steve Rush, Sara Schoenbeck, and Jack Wright.
His debut CD of solo improvisations, entymology, available through Barely Auditable Records, was hailed as "an enchanting experience that expands the possibilities (and the comprehension) of the double reed family" (Franois Couture, All-Music Guide). He has also recorded for Hat Art, New World, Musica Genera, 482 Music, Sedimental, Lucky Kitchen, Formed, Nine Winds, Rossbin, ToYo, Sickroom, Farrago, and Locust Music.
Bruckmann was born in 1971 in Danbury, CT, hometown of Charles Ives. He earned undergraduate degrees in music and psychology at Rice University in Houston, studying oboe with Robert Atherholt, serving as music director of campus radio station KTRU, and achieving academic distinction as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He completed his Masters degree in 1996 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he studied oboe performance with Harry Sargous and contemporary improvisation with Ed Sarath. He has attended the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival in Maine, the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, and the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara.
Gust Burns
gust burns is a pianist, improviser, and composer based in Seattle, Washington.
gust is foremost an improvising pianist. he continues to develop new routes into improvisation on the piano, working extensively with ideas concerning form, rhythm, and alternative narrative approaches, as well as new techniques for inside the piano. he also has a pronounced interest in the use of composition and improvisation together, and is usually writing music to this effect. gust also performs new music written by contemporary composers.
in addition to performing on his first instrument, the piano, gust also performs on tape recorders and electronics. the relationship between these two instrument identities is always evolving and is the source of interesting new inspirations and lines to understanding music. jazz, 20th century avant gardes, and the hip-hop music he grew up with are major sound influences that inform the music gust makes. however, a grand blend is not desired. rather, a practice that is equally focused in several different directions at different times. equal to this in importance is a keen interest in how issues such as intention, form, practice, and community, the socio-political-economic reality, and the music, all interact.
gust has been hyper-involved as an organizer and presenter of new music in seattle. he has been co-director of the seattle improvised music festival since 2002, curator of the festival since 2005, and co-director of the cooperative music venue gallery 1412 since 2004. he has helped to organize the annual afterears music festival, as well as the no west festival of northwest improvised music, and presented numerous concerts at the center on contemporary art, where he acted as music director for a period of time. gust is also the executive director of seattle improvised music, a local non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and developing the improvised music community in seattle.
gust is heavily involved with the improvised music community in Seattle, where he collaborates frequently with musicians like angelina baldoz, wally shoup, tom swafford, jason anderson, jesse canterbury, greg campbell, choreographer/dancer maureen whiting and others.
gust also engages in many longstanding projects with artists outside of seattle including a duo with alto saxophonist gregory reynolds (nyc), the trio with percussionist chris cogburn (austin, tx) and clarinetist jonathan sielaff (portland), and duos with bassist andrew lafkas (nyc), saxophonist phillip greenlief (oakland), and muti-instrumentalist bob marsh (oakland). interesting ongoing musical partnerships also include multi-instrumentalist bryan eubanks (nyc), saxophonist jack wright (pennsylvania), clarinetist lori freedman (montreal), violinist ernesto rodrigues (lisbon), uitarist david hirvonen (portland) and percussionist jeffrey allport (vancouver).
gust has also performed and collaborated with improvisers from around the world such as kieth rowe (france), kelvin pittman (portland), caroline kraabel (london), john edwards (london), stuart dempster (seattle), tim duroche (portland), frank gratkowski (germany), peggy lee (vancouver), dylan van der schyff (vancouver), nate wooley (nyc), chris forsythe (nyc), damon smith (oakland), ron samworth (vancouver), and many others.
besides improvising on the piano and tape recorders/ electronics, gust also performers his own compositions and has premiered works by west coast composers such as tara flandreau, tom swafford, and adam diller. he has also performed works by gyorgi ligeti.
in addition to performing and organizing, gust also is an active teacher, leading frequent workshops on improvised music in addition to his private piano teaching. for gust, teaching goes hand in hand with improvising and performing. both in terms of strengthening and developing the community in which he is an improviser, and in developing and crystallizing ideas about improvised music theory, practice, and performance.
Jesse Canterbury
Trained as a physicist, Jesse Canterbury has played music for years in a wide variety of situations. He discovered creative music through a 1992 performance of Terry Rileys landmark piece In C and was instantly hooked. He maintained a double life as a physicist and musician throughout the 1990s, conducting research on mass spectrometry, nonlinear dynamics, and femtosecond laser physics while performing the music of John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pauline Oliveros, as well as improvising on a regular basis. After receiving a Masters degree from the University of Texas at Austin, he took a detour from scientific pursuits, moved to Seattle, and began studying music intensively. Through these studies and a myriad of musical interests and influences, he has developed a unique approach to the clarinet that includes a remarkably lyrical sound in addition to a large vocabulary of extended techniques.
Throughout his performing career, he has worked and performed with many of the luminaries of creative music, including George Lewis, Butch Morris, Derek Bailey, Walter Thompson, Wayne Horvitz, Daniel Carter, and John Edwards. Jesse has appeared multiple times at festivals such as the Seattle Improvised Music Festival, the Vancouver International Jazz Festival, Earshot Jazz's Voice and Vision Series, the Olympia Experimental Music Festival, and Seattles Arts-in-Nature Festival. In addition to his improvising activities, he keeps an active schedule as a chamber musician. Notable performances include the American premiere of William O. Smiths 10x200 (with the University of Washington Contemporary Group), Arnold Schoenbergs Pierrot Lunaire, Oliver Messiaens Quatour Pour La Fin du Temps, Alban Bergs Vier Stucke, Michael Tenzers Three Island Duets (with Canadian virtuoso Franois Houle), and many new chamber works by Pacific Northwest composers. Upcoming performances with the newly formed Meridian Ensemble include music by Toru Takemitsu, Peter Maxwell-Davies, and Elliott Carter.
Jesse is a member of many ensembles making many different kinds of music: the Tom Baker Quartet (avant-jazz), Cipher (free improv and new compositions), SBBC (new improvisation-based chamber music), the Seattle New Music Ensemble (classical chamber music), and the Meridian Ensemble (classical chamber music). He is recording, with William O. Smith, an album of composed and improvised music for two clarinetists, featuring world-premiere recordings of several new works by Smith, in addition to commissions from Franois Houle and Tom Baker.
Andy Hayleck
percussion, computerhttp://chelagallery.org/duet/
Andy Hayleck (b. 1972) is a composer/ musician and recordist
Explores the aesthetics of sound, especially regarding how sound is perceived by the ear. He uses extremes of volume, pitch, and sound complexity, and variations in change over time. For the past few years he has concentrated on using unamplified bowed metal (cymbals and saw) in performance and using contact mics, hydrophones and regular mics in recording. Although he has used a computer for many years, recently he has begun to use one live. Currently a member of Trockeneis, he recently made a solo tour of the west coast of the United States (playing the amplified gong/wire). Recordings include: "Gong/Wire" (earlids), "Various Recordings Involving Ice" (HereSee), and "The Disappearing Floor" (Recorded).
Bill Horist
While, in the last several years, the guitar is considered more in terms of its limitations than its capabilities, BILL HORIST [explores] the guitars continued presence as a vital and still challenging form of musical expression. (Willamette Week-May, 1998).
Since moving to Seattle in 1995, BILL HORIST has established himself as a noted improviser/composer/performer along the West Coast and beyond. In the past decade, he has appeared on almost 40 recordings and has performed over 600 concerts in the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe and Japan. Bill has performed and/or recorded with Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, KK Null, Matt Chamberlain, Trey Gunn(King Crimson), Chris Cutler, Kawabata Makoto(Acid Mothers Temple), William Hooker, Trey Spruance(Mr Bungle/Secret Chiefs 3), Eugene Chadbourne, Tatsuya Yoshida(Ruins), Shazaad Ismaily, Climax Golden Twins, Haco, Illusion of Safety, Saadet Tuerkoez, Planktonman(Nortec Collective), Jack Wright, Amy Denio, Uchihashi Kazuhisa, Steve Fisk, Reggie Watts(Maktub), Anla Courtis (Reynols), Luigi Archetti, Michael White, Christoph Gallio, Eyvind Kang, Paul Rucker, Lesli Dalaba, Paul Hoskin, Thomas Dimuzio, Wally Shoup, Jessica Lurie, Mason Jones, Jeff Grienke, and Tucker Martine as well as members of Earth, The Boredoms and Larsen among others.
Horist has toured and recorded with a number of his own bands including Nobodaddy, Phineas Gage, Axolotl, UnFolkUs, Ghidra, Zahir, Tablet and Nervewheel.
As a solo artist, Bills improvised, prepared guitar work is informed by Hans Reichel, Fred Frith, and Henry Kaiser, but shows a unique style and personality. He has received critical praise internationally from periodicals including The Wire and Alternative Press, and several of his recordings have made critics year-end lists. In 2005 and 2006, he was nominated for "Jazz Artist of the Year" and "Guitarist of the Year" respectively by the Seattle Weekly.
Bill has toured the United States in support of his CDs "SOYLENT RADIO", "SONGS FROM THE NERVE WHEEL" and "LYRIC/SUITE". He has appeared at numerous festivals in the US, Mexico, Japan and Europe including Taktlos(Zuerich), Spring Reverb(San Diego/Tijuana), Big Sur Experimental Music Fest(Big Sur, CA), Mission Creek Music Fest(San Francisco), Seattle Improvised Music Fest, AntiMatter Fest(Vancouver BC) and Olympia Experimental Music Fest. He was the recipient of the 2006 GAP grant, 2005 Artist Trust Fellowship, the 1997 Jack Straw Artist Assistance Program Grant and has done several presentations and workshops at schools from first grade to college-level, including the University of Calgary, Seattle Art Institute, Martin Luther King Elementary (Seattle), the Experience Music Project and Big Picture School for at-risk youth.
Bill improvises and composes for film, dance and theater as well. In the Fall 2002, he was composer in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts where he developed a solo guitar score for University of Calgary choreographer, Davida Monk's "Lyric". Bill continues to work with Calgary's M-Body Dance company. He has also recorded pieces for an upcoming Italian theatrical production of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities".
Additionally, Horist works as sideman for recording and performing. He has worked with Kinski, Jessica Lurie, Two Loons for Tea, Elizabeth Carpenter, Mische Eddins, Paul Rucker, Rollerball, Sulpher, John Schuller, Karl Stevens and Nancy Martin among others.
For more info, e-mail flattopbix@yahoo.com.
Bonnie Jones
digital delay pedalshttp://chelagallery.org/bonnie
Bonnie Jones works with sound, text and performance. Born in 1977 in South Korea she was raised by dairy farmers in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, MD. In sound performances Bonnie plays the circuit boards of digital delay pedals. Her primary sound collaborators are Joe Foster in Korea (as the duet "English") and Andy Hayleck. She is also a member of the Performance Thanatology Research Society, a inter-discipinary performance group dedicated to the advancement of a higher histrionics brought on by imminent finalities. Bonnie has performed at the Kim Dae Hwan Museum, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, the ErstQuake Festival, and the 14 Karat Cabaret.
Tatsuya Nakatani
percussionhttp://www.hhproduction.org/TATSUYA_NAKATANI_WORKS.html
Originally from Kobe and Osaka, Japan, internationally renowned percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani has toured extensively throughout the world, having performed in approximately 80 cities and 10 countries.
Utilizing drumset, gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, metal objects, sticks and bows, he creates collages of sound, which combine the sense of space and beauty found in traditional Japanese folk music with the extended techniques of New Music, yet with great energy and intensity. Although his music defies category or genre, it can be viewed as a cross-cultural mixture of improvised music, experimental music, jazz, free jazz, and rock.
In addition to live solo and ensemble performances, he has provided sound design for films and television projects. The latest of these was the performance of an improvised sound score for silent movie- The Water Magician (1933, directed by Kenji Mizoguchi), which was part of exhibition of Hiroshi Sugimoto Photograph at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. He is the recent recipient of The Bronx Arts Council Individual Artist grant. Also he has been seIected PennPAT Artist Roster 2007(Pennsylvania Performing Art on Tour). In addition to his work as a percussionist, Nakatani heads H&H Production, an independent record label and recording studio based in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Andrea Neumann
inside piano, compositionhttp://www.japanimprov.com/profiles/aneumann
Born 1968 in Freiburg, grew up in Hamburg. Piano lessons since 1974. Studied piano at "Hochschule der Kunste" in Berlin. Since 1996 primarily active as improviser and composer in the areas of experimental and new music.
In the process of exploring the piano for new sound possibilities, she has reduced the instrument to strings, resonance board and metal frame. With the help of electronics to manipulate and amplify the sounds (sometimes to make parts of the sound audible which are inaudible without amplification), she has developed numerous new playing techniques, sounds, and ways of preparing the dismantled instrument. Because the original inside piano is very heavy, a piano builder (Bernd Bittmann, Berlin) constructed a new and lighter one for her.
She has worked intensively in the crossover area between composition and improvisation, and in the field between electronic and handmade sounds, with Berlin musicians such as Annette Krebs, Ignaz Schick, Axel Drner, Robin Hayward and Burkhard Beins. She has composed for inside piano for interdisciplinary projects including film, dance, performance, etc. Concerts and performances in Germany, Europe, USA, Russia, and Japan.
Jamie Potter
Jamie Potter is an electronic musician from Seattle. He utilizes oscillators, effects, and other electronics to create minimalist sonic textures.
Wally Shoup
Wally Shoup plays unfettered, emotion-laden alto saxophone and has been involved in freely improvised music since the mid-70's. His playing combines the grit of free jazz and blues with an ear toward lyrical abstraction, all at the service of creating coherent music in the moment.
His early work in Colorado is documented on Scree-Run Waltz (1981), one of the first independently produced LPs of American free-improvisation. From 1981 to 1985, he worked with the Davey Williams and La Donna Smith in Birmingham, Alabama and wrote reviews and articles for The Improvisor magazine while there. Since 1985, he has been a central member of the Seattle improvised music. He has led many notable improvising Seattle groups and has been involved in organizing the Seattle Improvised Music Festival since 1987.
His work is documented on several labels, most notably Leo Records, who has released four of his CDs and Strange-Attractors, who released Immolation/Immersion (w/Nels Cline and Chris Corsano) in 2005. He has worked with a wide array of musicians, including Thurston Moore, Nels Cline, Davey Williams, La Donna Smith, Jack Wright, Paul Hession, Dylan Van der Schyff, Paul Flaherty, Chris Corsano, Reuben Radding, Toshi Makihara and many others.
His current Seattle projects include Ghidra (w/Bill Horist and Mike Peterson), the John Alton Trio (w/Bob Rees and Geoff Harper) & the Spider Trio (w/Jeffrey Taylor and Dave Abramson). Additionally, he is a painter (represented by the Garde-Rail Gallery and Vital 5 Productions) and writer, having published numerous articles about art, music & aesthetics.
Jonathan Sielaff
clarinets, saw, banjocomposer/ performer born in Miami, FL, he grew up in a musical family (his father and grandfather were both professional reed players). He began his studies with the piano, then picked up guitar and electronics in his teens, and has now been focusing on the clarinets. In composing and performing, he draws heavily from his experiences traveling and living int he South Pacific and Asia as well as participating in a wide array of musical settings and genres. He has lived in Portland since 2000 where he regularly collaborates with a variety of musicians, poets, dancers, and film-makers.
Chris Stover
Seattle-based musician Chris Stover is quickly becoming known as one of the most innovative trombonists and composers on the creative music scene today. He leads the exciting quintet More Zero as well as the Chris Stover Quartet and the twelve-piece Acquired Involuntary Narcissism, he performs regularly with Frieze of Life, Sonando, the James Knapp Orchestra, Quake, Quasi Nada, and many others, and he has toured in the US, Canada, South America, Europe, and Africa with, among others, Pablo Moses and Apple Gabriel.
Chris appears on over thirty recordings, and his compositions have been performed in the US, Europe, and Japan. He is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music and is currently finishing his PhD in music theory at the University of Washington. In addition to a thorough background in jazz and classical music he has studied the music of Brazil, Cuba, and Zimbabwe extensively, and much of his music reflects these musical influences.
Up-to-date news and booking information, as well as the new More Zero CD, can be found at www.morezero.com.
Nate Wooley
trumpethttp://www.natewooley.com
Nate Wooley (b. 1974) grew up in a Finnish-American fishing village in Oregon. He has spent the rest of his life trying musically to find a way back to the peace and quiet of that time by whole-heartedly embracing the space between complete absorption in sound and relative absence of the same. He began playing trumpet professionally at age 13 with his father, and after studying he moved to Colorado where he studied more with Ron Miles, Art Lande, Fred Hess, and improvisation master Jack Wright. His tenure with Jack began to break Nate out of self-imposed molds and into the sound world that he has embraced as his own.
Nate currently resides in Jersey City, NJ and performs solo trumpet improvisations as well as with his trio Blue Collar with Steve Swell and Tatsuya Nakatani. He has also performed regularly with Anthony Braxton, Bhob Rainey, Alessandro Bosetti, Fritz Welch, Herb Robertson, Kevin Norton, Tony Malaby, Randy Peterson, Scott Rosenberg, Matt Moran, Chris Speed, Andrew DAngelo, Tim Barnes, Okkyung Lee, Assif Tsahar, and other improvisation luminaries.
"Nate has striven to blur the demarcations between tonality and texture, extreme sound and the protracted use of silence, nervous energy and an almost painful amount of patience. His trumpet playing is a obscene distillation of Booker Little, Leo Smith, Axel Dorner, and Bill Dixon. The scary part is how powerfully 'Nate' this distillation is. His solo shows have made me revisit all of my childhood fears while he has enough straight up jazz prowess to rival almost anybody in New York."
"If you were to draw a graph of the dynamics of Nate Wooley's playing there would be no sudden spikes. Each peak and valley would be approached
with a thoughtful curve. He plays with great timbral variety, but every sound is musical."
- Matt Rand, All About Jazz.