Tetuzi Akiyama (Tokyo)
http://www.japanimprov.com/takiyama/
Guitar, electronics, viola, and self-made instrument player
Born in Tokyo, April 13, 1964.
Tetuzi Akiyama is a highly unique and experimental guitarist heavily applying free improvisation and noise. Besides guitar, he also plays electronics, viola, and self-made instruments. Akiyama became an enthusiastic hard rock fan when he was eleven years old, and started playing electric guitar at the age of thirteen. Later, he also came to be very interested in free improvisation and classical music. He formed the improvised music band Madhar in 1987. He also started playing classical viola, and formed the Hikyo String Quintet in 1994. The band, which played avant-garde improvised classical music, consisted of a viola, two cello, and two violin players, and included Taku Sugimoto on cello. Sugimoto soon left the band, which thus became a quartet. Later that year, Akiyama and Sugimoto launched their guitar duo, Akiyama-Sugimoto. They played gigs in New York in 1995, and in the Midwest (including Chicago and Detroit) in '96. For about a year starting in early 1994, Akiyama was also a member of Nijiumu, one of guitarist Keiji Haino's bands. Recently Akiyama has two improvised music projects: Sutekina Tea Time, a duo with Takashi Matsuoka (guitar, vocal); and Mongoose, a trio with Sugimoto and Utah Kawasaki (analog synthesizer). Since 1998, together with Sugimoto and Toshimaru Nakamura (no-imput mixing board), he has been organizing an inspiring monthly concert series, The Improvisation Meeting at Bar Aoyama (renamed The Experimental Meeting in '99, and Meeting at Off Site in 2000).
Liz Allbee (Oakland)
Liz Allbee is a voracious musician whose work spans many genres, including new music, improvisation, electronic composition, Asian folk and pop, noise, minimalist, free jazz and experimental rock. She has played with a wide array of musicians, including Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Cecil Taylor, Hans Grusel, Birgit Uhler, Alberto Braida, Fabrizio Spera, Gino Robair, Yugen Noh Theater, SFSound, and with members of Caroliner, Sun City Girls, and Rova. She lives in Oakland, CA.
"Allbee is no slouch, a sharp and gifted musician with a highly developed personality and a warped sense of humour..." -Sound Projector #15, London, UK. Spring 2007
Jeffrey Allport (Vancouver)
http://www.myspace.com/jeffreyallport
Vancouver-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 US, Western Europe and Japan. Summer 2007 saw the LP release of his duo with Tetuzi Akiyama, recorded during a small tour of the Northwest in the summer of 2006. Frequently participating in once-only groupings has led him to performing and recording with a wide variety of improvisers from around the world including Annette Krebs, Nate Wooley, Gust Burns, Andrea Neumann, and Keith Rowe.
Gust Burns (Seattle)
b. 1978 Tacoma, Washington
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 makes improvised and new music that counts many different perspectives and lines of tradition as influences. Both jazz and classical traditions, the rap and hip-hop music he grew up with, the avant-garde lineages in Europe and America, and the traditions of improvised music over the last 40 years. He has a keen interest in how issues such as intention, practice, community, and musical content effect the role music plays in the socio-political-economic reality; and how this reality effects the music.
In addition to performing and composing, Gust is also a seasoned presenter of new music in Seattle. He has been director of the Seattle Improvised Music Festival since 2002, where he strives to facilitate collaborations between leading and emerging Seattle Improvisers and world-renowned International Improvisers. Gust is also the president of Seattle Improvised Music, a local non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and developing the improvised music community in Seattle.
In addition to frequent collaborations with Seattle Improvisers, Gust collaborates and performs with choreographer/dancer Maureen Whiting, poet Melanie Noel, and has longstanding projects outside of seattle including: duo with alto saxophonist Gregory Reynolds (NYC), trio with percussionist Chris Cogburn (Austin) and clarinetist Jonathan Sielaff (Portland), and duos with bassist Andrew Lafkas (NYC), and muti-instrumentalist Bob Marsh (Oakland). Gust's piano duo with classical pianist Julie Ives has commissioned numerous new pieces for two pianos, and performed music by Gyorgy Ligeti.
Gust has also performed with well known improvisers such as Kieth Rowe (France), Caroline Kraabel (London), John Edwards (London), Lori Freedman (Montreal), Frank Gratkowski (Germany), Jefferey Allport, Peggy Lee (Vancouver), Jack Wright (Pennsylvania), and Rapper Adam 'Dose One' Drucker.
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 since 2001. 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.
Greg Campbell (Seattle)
In settings from free improvisation to creative jazz to realizing classical compositions, percussionist Greg Campbell is among the most accomplished and inventive musicians in the Northwest. He performs on drum set, vibraphone, percussion, and French horn. Greg has studied with Dave Holland, Cecil McBee, George Russell, and UW percussionist Tom Collier, and has performed with Muhal Richard Abrams, Stuart Dempster, William O. Smith, Frank Gratkowski, Wolfgang Fuchs, Francois Houle, Wally Shoup, Wayne Horvitz, and Avram Fefer, among many others. He has also been a member of Seattle EXperimental Opera and the Seattle-based groups Brainstun (led by Christian Asplund), Project W, Ota Prota, and Jessica Lurie's Motorbison. He is also a member of the traditional Asante drumming group known as Akoma. Greg's most recent recording project, a trio led by world-class Seattle bassist Michael Bisio that included Portland brass virtuoso Rob Blakeslee, will be released by Cadence Jazz Recordings in mid-2004. Greg is currently completing a doctorate in percussion performance at the University of Washington.
Mark Collins (Seattle)
Mark Collins has played upright bass in a variety of settings with, among others, Jesse Canterbury, Angelina Baldoz, Tari Nelson-Zagar, Amelia Reeber, Gust Burns, Aiko Shimada, Doug Theriault, and latin duo Correo Aereo.
Lesli Dalaba (Seattle)
"...Lesli Dalaba's exquisite trumpet .... is extraordinarily moving, disarmingly, wrenchingly raw. Beautiful." ~ Earshot Jazz
Trumpeter Lesli Dalaba has played throughout the U.S. and Europe, as a soloist, in small ensembles, and in larger bands such as the New York Composers Orchestra, Elliott SharpÕs Carbon, Fred Friths Tense Serenity, and the Balkan brass band Zlatne Ustne. Zlatne Ustne was the first foreign band to be invited to the annual Gucca brass band festival and competition in Serbia.
Additional musicians Miss Dalaba has collaborated with include Derek Bailey, George Lewis, Wayne Horvitz, LaMonte Young, and Stuart Dempster.
After moving from New York to Seattle in 1990, Lesli was a member of Jeff GreinkeÕs LAND which produced 3 CDs and performed for eight years, including a month-long tour of China in 1996. The tour is discussed in Dennis ReaÕs Live at the Forbidden City.
The most recent release of her own compositions, Timelines (Tzadik), is an ambitious musical rendering of 5 billion years of EarthÕs history in accurate, relative time. Timelines features Carla Kihlstedt, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins and Amy Denio. Miss Dalaba received a Jack Straw Foundation grant in 2005 for developing Timelines as a live performance.
Since 2004, she has been the director of the Yellow Hat Band, a 13-piece community brass band which plays frequently, without warning. The Yellow Hat Band specializes in traditional brass music from all over the world.
Lesli Dalaba also practices acupuncture and Chinese Medicine on Capitol Hill in Seattle.
Partial discography:
Core Sample
Ear-Rational 1025, 1991
with Herb Robertson, Sussan Daheim, Elliott Sharp
LAND
Extreme 032, 1994
with Jeff Greinke, Ed Pias, Dennis Rea
Zahir
Endless Records 009, 2002
with Randall Dunn and Bill Horist
Dalaba/Frith/Glick-Reiman/Kihlstedt
Accretions ALP030, 2003
Timelines
Tzadik 7713, 2004
with Carla Kihlstedt, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins, Amy Denio
Lung Tree
ReR Records 02677, 2004
with Eric Glick-Reiman and Stuart Dempster
Chris Delaurenti (Seattle)
http://www.delaurenti.net/index.html
Christopher DeLaurenti is a Seattle based composer, improvisor, and phonographer. A new music rabble-rouser, he also writes music reviews and articles.
"My music, the offspring of my love affair with sound, in corporates murky atmospheres, unusual field recordings, everyday speech, and an array of instruments deployed in maniacal recombinant polyphony. I seek not only to capture the ordinary and extraordinary sounds of everyday life, but to bear witness to current crises that touch my conscience and impel me to respond."
Jean Paul Jenkins (Portland)
JP is international and flavorful. No one thing is more important than another thing. Please wait, something will happen. One idea at a time...he reserves multitasking for waiting tables (which is slightly deceptive because even there he does one thing at a time only very quickly) Sharing/caring/opening/listening/we have hands not tentacles/no earlids/high frequencies are so 2001/tea/cheap rent/time to stare/comfortable shoes/tape releases/daily porch show Functionally he resides in the space between what and huh? Trial and error, usually the latter. I will occasionally wear clothes that embarrass my friends. He lives above Citybikes at 20th and SE Ankeny in Portland OR and wants you to come over and play some music and eat salad.
Jason Kahn (Zürich)
Jason Kahn is a sound and visual artist based in Zürich. His work includes sound installation, performance and composition. He was born in New York, grew up in Los Angeles and relocated to Europe in 1990.
Kahn has been exhibiting his sound and visual works since the late 1990's, and has had solo and group exhibitions internationally, including museums, galleries and arts spaces in the USA, Canada, France, Croatia, Germany, Argentina, Egypt, Poland, Switzerland, Denmark, Austria and Spain. Originally a percussionist, Kahn later began integrating live electronics into his playing. He currently performs with different combinations of percussion, analogue synthesizer or computer.
As a composer, Kahn's work draws on electronic and acoustic sound sources to create slowly developing compositions imbued with a sense of timelessness. His work addresses the entity of sound as both a physical and psychological factor shaping our consciousness. Kahn's sound installations seek to enhance spatial awareness through sonic intervention, focusing on expanding our perception to other dimensions of seeing, hearing and feeling a space.
Kahn has given concerts at various festivals, art spaces and clubs throughout Europe, North and South America, Japan, Mexico, Korea, Israel, Turkey, Russia, Lebanon, Egypt, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia.
Wade Matthews (Madrid)
American improviser, composer and author, Wade Matthews, has been living in Madrid, Spain, since 1989. Besides his solo concerts, he performs in duo with Toulouse-based dancer ValŽrie MŽtivier and with Norwegian percussionist, Ingar Zach, as well as one-offs with innumerable improvisers in concerts and festivals throughout the world (New York, Paris, Madrid, London, Berlin, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Beirut, Montevideo, Los Angeles, Oslo, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Toulouse, etc.). Recent activities include two performances at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Annual Festival of the International Society for Computer Music, and at the Reina Sof’a Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid.
Electronic music influences all of his work, including his purely acoustic use of woodwinds, which he approaches as acoustic synthesizers, emphasizing the nature of sound as matter unto itself rather than as simply material from which to generate phrases. He is especially interested in the permeability of sound and sonic discourse to its surroundings and has extensively explored numerous aspects of site-specific improvisation, both musically and in his essays. His electronic work is generated purely through the use of synthesis, with no recourse to sampling, a decision based not so much on aesthetic criteria as on a particular sense of how he wants musical process to interface with instrumental praxis.
Matthews earned his Doctor of Musical Arts from Columbia University in New York, where he studied composition and electronic music with Mario Davidovsky, writing his dissertation on improvisation guided by electronic sounds. Previous studies include woodwinds with Joe Allard at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In 2003 he received a commission from the French Government (Commande d'Etat) to create a work exploring the possible relations between acoustic instruments and various techniques of phonography. The work, titled Lieux, was premiered at the festival Rencontres de Musique et Quotidien Sonor in southern France in May, 2004.
Gregory Reynolds (New York City)
b. 1973 Westport, Connecticuit
Gregory Reynolds is a dynamic musician whose drive to investigate and explore the dynamics of modern sound making has shaped his unique identity as a performer, composer, listener, and thinker. At the root of his practice is an attempt to present a personal vocabulary of sound events and spaces that challenge and re-orient the listener by emphasizing a new relationship to acoustic phenomena outside the usual context of 'historical' listening particular to well worn tropes and styles. He endeavors to facilitate an experience of heightened sensitivity and awareness of physical, architectural, and spiritual qualitites by leaving enough room to engage each listener in a unique dialogue.
His unlikely vehicle in these pursuits has been the alto saxophone, on which for many years he has been developing an astonishing variety of acoustic extended techniques drawing from such influences as water, white noise, cd skips, and the complex drones of industrial and domestic machinery.
Stéphane Rives (Paris)
http://palriv.free.fr/
http://www.myspace.com/stephanerives
The mechanism of the saxophone permits a concrete-acoustic approach to the instrument. The possiblilities of acting directly on the pads and the flexibility of the reed offer subtle means of altering the sonic wave generated by breath. Once one adopts a way of thinking based on the sort of filtering any electronic musician does, oneÕs attention is drawn to the tiny micro-events that are barely audible in a traditional approach. The sonic planes twist and acoustic distortion emerges, revealing the subtle grains and textures lying ÒinsideÓ the acoustic sound. New materials arise as though they had always been right there, hidden behind the immediately perceptible. In order to gain control of them, one reduces any idea of willful intervention to an absolute minimum, leaving only the flow of air through the metal cone, an action that is discrete in certain parameters.
My playing is not about arriving at something; instead, it is an instant that answers to that logic. My musical reflection focuses on questions of praxis. I am not driven by musical intention in the strict sense of the term, but the experience of sound I propose represents a means of ÒexcitingÓ the listener, a way of questioning, of shaking up his feeling of psycological security and transforming his relationship to listening.
Jonathan Sielaff (Portland)
clarinets, saw, banjo
composer/ 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.
Greg Sinibaldi (Seattle)
The distinctive voice of saxophonist, bass clarinetist and composer Greg Sinibaldi evolves from a psyche absorbed in both classical and jazz studies. His study of form and structure along with his love of improvisation unite in artfully crafted music that expresses the Òphenomenon of explorationÓ with exquisitely composed melodic harmonies and textures.
Greg's early years were spent in the Northwest playing bebop and traditional jazz arrangements in high school bands. Here he developed an appreciation for jazz forms. He began his college education at Central Washington University , then traveled to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory where he received a BA in Jazz Studies. While studying composition and improvisation at the Conservatory, he developed an ear for timber -- something he had not heard in the standard jazz combo.
This led him to the work of famed microtonal composer and improviser Joseph Maneri. Maneri says of their time together, ÒGreg came to hear me quite often. My intuition told me he had to study with me.Ó Greg steeped himself in the fundamentals of modern classical music developing his own unique style. Working under the instruction of Maneri he saw, ÒGreg's God-given gift flourish like the palm trees. His musicianship is on the highest of levels.Ó While at the Conservatory Greg also had the privilege of studying with George Garzone, Jimmy Giuffre, and others.
Returning to Seattle after a brief stint in San Francisco, Greg began writing music and putting exciting projects together; Vena Cava, The Greg Sinibaldi Trio, Cipher, Frieze of Life, the Greg Sinibaldi Band and the trio ÒGoatÓ. He also began writing large scale works that combine composition and improvisational elements.
Greg has been the recipient of grants from the Puffin Foundation, Jack Straw Foundation, Centrum, 4Culture and The City of Seattle and has been Artist in Residence at the Banff Center and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He has also worked and performed with Gunther Schuller, Jimmy Giuffre, Wayne Horvitz, Dave Douglas, Donny McCaslin, Greg Osby, Cuong Vu, Robert Dick, Amy Denio, John Edwards, Caroline Krabel, Bob Marsh, Matt Moran and many others. He is currently working on a number of scores that will accompany the silent films of Wladislaw Starewicz.
Tyler Wilcox (Bellingham)
born 1979 in silver spring maryland. grew up in columbia, maryland, an unincorporated interracial planned city. listening mostly to hip hop and dancehall. moved to inner city baltimore at the age of 21.began to compose glacial electronic music based on prime numbers, pure sine tones and field recordings. fed up with the lack of physicality in electronic music began to experiment with a wide range of acoustic instruments (the whole reed family,contrabass bugle,trombone,cello,viola,bassoon). settling finally on the soprano saxophone and a rotating member of the clarinet family. in 2003 began playing duos with baltimore percussionist paul neidhardt. in 2005 formed trigenarational sextet birds in the sky drawing on the space/time of gagaku,bebop and morton feldman's crippled symmetry. the same year baltimore was left behind for the dark mystery of the wet fir woods and knife edged peaks of northern washington. watazumido doso said "When you hear some music or hear some sound, if for some reason you like it very well; the reason is that sound is in balance or in harmony with your pulse. And so making a sound, you try to make various different sounds that imitate various different sounds of the universe, but what you are finally making is your own sound, the sound of yourself."
Jozef van Wissem (Netherlands)
http://www.jozefvanwissem.com/
Composer-lute player Jozef Van Wissem is renowned for his unusual approach of the Renaissance lute. He cuts and pastes classical pieces, reverses melodies, adds electronics and processed field recordings The unusual wedlock of composition and improvisation creates an unheard amalgam of contemporary folk and late Renaissance music Van Wissem probably plays the most unlikely instruments in the world of contemporary improvised music: the Renaissance and Baroque lute and has accomplished the strange feat of bridging the idiom of seventeenth century lute literature and twenty-first century free improv of the silent type. Although he uses subtle electronic sound manipulation, he has largely stayed faithful to the particular timbre, resonance and playing technique of the lute. Van Wissem first came to be noticed a few years ago because of his radical conceptual approach to Renaissance lute music: he deconstructed existing compositions, for instance by playing them backwards. He also composed his own pieces for lute, using palindromes and mirrored structures. His music therefore does not have a traditional linear progression, nor leads to a climax, it rather stays on the same level of intensity. His music is quiet and not so much demands concentrated listening, as it will bring the listener in a state of concentrated listening - an aspect that makes Van Wissem a natural ally of the current post-reductionist improvising musicians. He also runs the Incunabulum label. He also works with M.B. / Maurizio Bianchi, James Blackshaw, Chris Forsyth, Tetuzi Akiyama and Elliot Sharp. Wire Magazine called his latest solo lute cd "Stations of the Cross" a small masterpiece.