The Band That Has Avoided The Whole Idea of Having A Band Name -- Scott Walton, contrabass;
Matt Ingalls, clarinets & violin;
Tim Perkis, electronics;
Tom Djll, trumpet and electronics -- present an evening of instant compositions for quartet. Four of the Bay Area's best composer/improvisers, these players have shared a tight, joyful and fireworksy quartet space since 2010.
Scott Walton is a bassist and pianist whose music negotiates the terrain between jazz, free improvisation, and classical avant-garde. Praised for his "dramatic" soloing (Downbeat), "graceful fluidity" (All About Jazz), and "propulsive energy" (OneFinalNote), the Downtown Music Gallery proclaims that Walton "consistently shines." He has performed throughout North America and Europe in a host of collaborative contexts, and has recorded with Vinny Golia, Nels Cline, Myra Melford, and Bobby Bradford, among many others. Current projects include duos with Steve Adams,
Tim Perkis, and Gilbert Isbin, the Michael Vllatkovich quartet, the Bill Horvitz Sextet, and Alex Cline's Flower Garland Orchestra. Walton holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of California, San Diego, and has designed courses and implemented online music instruction for universities and colleges in California and Colorado. He has served as an adjunct instructor for UCCS since 2010.
Reviled for his "shapeless sonic tinkering" by the Los Angeles Times, oakland musician
Matt Ingalls is a composer, clarinetist, concert producer, and computer music programmer. Often incorporating elements of improvisation, his music is heavily influenced by his long involvement in computer music. His composerly solo improvisations explore extended clarinet techniques that interact with the acoustic space, often as combination tones. Matt is the founder and co-director of sfSound, a new music series, ensemble, and internet radio station devoted to new ideas and traditions of experimental music, performance art, live electronic music, Bay Area composition, and the various facets of contemporary improvisation.
Tim Perkis has been working in the medium of live electronic and computer sound for many years, performing, exhibiting installation works and recording in North America,Europe and Japan. His work has largely been concerned with exploring the emergence of life-like properties in complex systems of interaction.
In addition, he is a well known performer in the world of improvised music, having performed on his electronic improvisation instruments with hundreds of artists and groups, including Chris Brown, John Butcher, Eugene Chadbourne, Fred Frith, Gianni Gebbia, Frank Gratkowski, Luc Houtkamp, Yoshi Ichiraku,
Matt Ingalls, Joelle Leandre, Gino Robair, ROVA saxophone quartet, Elliott Sharp, Leo Wadada Smith and John Zorn. Ongoing groups he has founded or played in include the League of Automatic Music Composers and the Hub -- pioneering live computer network bands -- and Rotodoti, the Natto Quartet, Fuzzybunny, All Tomorrow's Zombies and Wobbly/Perkis/Antimatter.
His occasional critical writings have been published in The Computer Music Journal, Leonardo and Electronic Musician magazine; he has been composer-in-residence at Mills College in Oakland California, artist-in-residence at Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, and designed musical tools and toys at Paul Allen's legendary thinktank, Interval Research.
His checkered career as a researcher and engineer has brought him a variety of interesting projects: designing museum displays for science and music museums in San Francisco, Toronto and Seattle, creating artificial-intelligence based auction tools for business, building scientific experimental apparati, consulting on multimedia art presentation networks for the SF Art Commission and SF Airport, writing software embedded in toys and other consumer products, and creating new tools for sound and video production, research and analysis.
Recordings of his work are available on several labels: Artifact,Limited Sedition, 482, Lucky Garage, Praemedia, Rastascan and Tzadik(USA); EMANEM(UK); Sonore and Meniscus(France); Curva Minore and Snowdonia(Italy); XOR(Netherlands); Creative Sources(Portugal).
He is also producer and director of a feature-length documentary on musicians and sound artists in the San Francisco Bay area called NOISY PEOPLE (2007).
Tom Djll studied electronic music with Stephen Scott at the Colorado College, working with the EMS Synthi 100 system at Packard Hall. He spent the years 1981-1993 working with the Serge Modular Music System before enrolling in Mills College Contemporary Music Program, where he extended his quest to develop and integrate a personally developed extended trumpet language into an electronic sound environment, while also pursuing advanced improvisation studies, formally, with Pauline Oliveros, and, informally, with Jack Wright. While at Mills, Djll concentrated on microtonal composition, split-tone trumpet technique, and computer music. He also worked extensively with Chris Brown, resulting in contributions to Brown’s recordings LAVA (Tzadik) and DUETS (Artifact).
Further refinement of trumpet languages and free improvisation with his band GROSSE ABFAHRT was undertaken from 1999 – 2010, with international CD releases resulting on the Emanem, Creative Sources, and Setola di Maiale labels. Beginning in 2012, Djll gradually re-introduced electronics into his sound-set. The results are heard in projects such as hackMIDI (extreme electro-mechanical piano music), the hardcore free-noise trio BEAUTY SCHOOL, piano + analog electronics in TENDER BUTTONS (with Tania Chen and Gino Robair), delicate environments in EUPHOTIC (with Cheryl Leonard and Bryan Day), austere acoustic spaces with KOKUO (Kanoko Nishi-Smith, John McCowen, Jacob Felix Heule, and Kyle Bruckmann) and ongoing sessions and performances within the lively and ever-evolving Bay Area scene, with playing partners old and new (including but not limited to
Tim Perkis, Amanda Chaudhary, Jordan Glenn, Clarke Robinson, Suki O’Kane,
Matt Ingalls, Tom Nunn, bran(…)pos, and Karen Stackpole.
Cost: $10 for every type of entity in the universe