Serving the San Francisco Bay Area New Music Community

Sun, May 22 2016 7:00 PM


Edgetone 25th Anniversary Showcase Series
**Performances celebrating twenty five years of independent music from Edgetone Recoords**
E. Doctor Smith presents music from the Drummstick I&II and Quantum
Peter McKibben - guitar/synthesizer/loops, E. Doctor Smith - Zendrum EXP- samples/loops, and featuring Laura Austin Wiley - flute/effects/loops
Matt Davignon - drum machine/effects
Finkbeiner/Allen/Orr
John Finkbeiner- guitar, Josh Allen - tenor saxophone, Timothy Orr - drums
...and more! TBA

E. Doctor Smith is a musician, producer and recording artist with Edgetone Records, who has worked with the likes of Brian Eno, Madonna, Warren Zevon, Mickey Hart and many others. He is also the Arts & Entertainment editor for Beyond Chron and inventor of the musical instrument, the Drummstick! Doc's latest projects are with bansurist John Wubbenhorst and his group Facing East, "FutureJazz" with guitarist Peter McKibben, and with Steve McQuarry's Electric Quartet featuring bassist Ted Burik and violinist Michele Walther of McQuarry's Resonance Jazz octet.

Matt Davignon’s music is “fragile and gorgeous and stubbornly weird,” according to the SF Bay Guardian. He’s best known for combining drum machine and/or pre-recorded voices with a variety of electronic processing devices to create shifting layers of organic and expressive sounds. His music is inspired by field recordings, natural sound phenomena, irregular and imperfect rhythms, and psychedelic, drone and space music.
In addition to his solo work, Matt frequently collaborates with other improvisers. With Hugh Behm-Steinberg, he manipulates speech recordings in the band Oa (https://edgetonerecords.bandcamp.com/album/oa).

"The group no one wants to hear!" That's what bassist Damon Smith titled the trio , though to be fair to Mr. Smith, he said it with great reverence and humor. Their work strives to defy convention; their total being greater than the sum of the parts. Like many of today’s prominent musicians, Mr. Allen was a product of the Berkeley public school system, studying saxophone starting at the age of nine under Phil Hardymon. He went on to study with such prominent Bay Area musicians as Bill Aron, Joe Henderson, and Rory Snyder. With his focus squarely on jazz composition and performance, Mr. Allen moved to Southern California in the early nineties to study with Rick Helzer at San Diego State. He became active in the Latin Jazz community, and worked with various musicians such as Dennis Chambers, and Eddie Palmieri. Mr. Allen’s return to the Bay Area in the mid 90s to finish his Bachelors degree at Sonoma State. His association with saxophonist Marco Eneidi led to working relationships with musicians such as Glen Spearmann, Matthew Goodheart, Damon Smith, and eventually Cecil Taylor.


Edgetone Records was founded by musician/producer, Rent Romus. The label took shape in 1991 to support his group’s original jazz recordings. After being on a long hiatus Rent re-opened Edgetone in January 2000 and expanded it to support avant-garde and experimental music and recordings crossing the genre boundaries specifically for D.I.Y. (do it yourself) artists looking for a ground base and community label identity. In 2016 Edgetone now carries over 180 releases from artists across the United States and beyond.

Cost: $10-$20 sliding scale
Audio samples in which musicians at this event play:
Videos featuring musicians playing at this event
"K3" by Trio Electrique, written by 7 string bassist Edo Castro Woodhouse, featuring Michele Walter on electric violin and E. "Doc" Smith on zendrum. Recorded live by Glenda Bates at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.
A montage of the free music group the Lords of Outland from their live presented as part of The Tenderloin Museum’s Sounds of the Tenderloin live music series at the Tenderloin National Forest in San Francisco July of 2022 Featuring Rent Romus on alto/soprano saxophones, Ray Schaeffer on bass, Anthony Flores on drums, and Philip Everett on