The 7th Annual Edgetone New Music SummitSonicPulseQ&A Session 7:15 -7:30 pm
Performance Starts @ 8:15 pm
Different Strokes (string duets with Yehudit & Beth Snellings)
C.O.M.A. (CD Release celebration performance for Big Words)
Noertker’s Moxie(performing a new suite of music, "La Naturecanique," to the film loops of David Beck)
GoGo Fight Master(Saxophonist Aaron Bennett's Power Quartet) 
Different Strokes(string duets with Yehudit & Beth Snellings)
Two classically trained and jazz savvy string players stretch the bounds of their instruments to create a unique approach. Formed in the spring of 2000, Different Strokes has performed at venues around the SF Bay Area, including the Old First Church Concert Series, San Francisco Arts Festival, SIMM series, People in Plazas Series, Canvas Gallery, The Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival; The Berkeley Art Center, Bird’s Nest Jazz Series, and the Healdsburg Society for Music and Art to name a few. Different Strokes is also on the performance roster of Bread and Roses, Inc.
Violinist Yehudit (pronounced "yeah who DEET") has made a place for herself in the forefront of the jazz scene, demonstrating that the electric violin, in her hands, is a convincing and innovative jazz instrument. The artists she has appeared with include John Handy, Dan Hicks, Walter Savage, Denise Perrier, and Jules Broussard. In May of 2007, Yehudit resigned her long-time position with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra in order to devote her full energies to performance and composition.
Beth Snellings, cellist, has been performing in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past 20 years. Her performing experience spans such musically diverse contexts as symphony orchestras, musical theatre, television, chamber music ensembles, jazz combos and new music groups. Beth’s credits include performances at the 2007 San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival (Charya Burt Cambodian Dance Company), a European tour of “West Side Story,” performances with the Austin Willacy Band and the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. She was also the music director of “Funky Fitness”, a TV show produced in San Francisco.
C.O.M.A. (The California Outside Music Associates)
(CD Release celebration performance for Big Words)
"C.O.M.A. does with jazz what Kronos Quartet does with chamber music: they update and expand the tradition" - Greggory Moore, Long Beach Culture
C.O.M.A. The California Outside Music Associates, is a collective of improvising musicians from central California dedicated to music of the moment. The collective performs throughout California in settings ranging from the duo to an octet, with dancers, visual artists and poets.
John Vaughn is a founding member of C.O.M.A. He is currently involved in a recording project with COMA and playing with as many creative people as possible. He has performed in groups ranging from concert and jazz bands, pit orchestras to improvisations groups of all types. He is often playing in Sacramento with the Gambari Arts Ensemble led by Adam Jenkins or at Old Ironsides with Ross Hammond and Tony Passerell. John is focused on making the central Valley of California into a friendly place for improvising and experimental musicians.
Dax Compise is one of the founding members of the California Outside Music Associates. He has performed throughout the region in settings ranging from the symphony, to blues and jazz groups, to fully improvised percussion ensembles. His command of the instrument and creativity has led to Dax being great demand as a sideman. Besides performing on a regular basis with COMA, he has forged a musical relationship with the improvisational community in Sacramento. Recordings with Ross Hammond and Tony Passerell are in the works.
Zach Silver is primarily a violinist, but also plays guitar, sings and compute. He is a school teacher in rural San Joaquin County. Zach has played and recorded with groups ranging from bluegrass to punk rock to experimental music in the Central Valley and the SF Bay Area. For the past year Zach has been a regular player in the Blackwater ensemble of improvisor's playing in the Yosemite Sound Series in Stockton California.
Noertker’s Moxie(performing a new suite of music, "La Naturecanique," to the film loops of David Beck)
Noertker's Moxie will be performing a new suite of music, "La Naturecanique," composed especially for the Edgetone New Music Summit by bassist Bill Noertker.
"La Naturecanique" is inspired by film maker/musician David Beck's intimately-scaled moving sculptures. Film loops of each moving sculpture will be projected while the band is performing each piece. The use of loops will remove the time constraints usually associated with film scoring
and allow for the exploratory and open-ended compositions that Noertker’s Moxie favors.
For this performance, Noertker’s Moxie will include Noertker’s long-time co-collaborator Annelise Zamula on tenor saxophone and flute, David Beck on baritone saxophone, Jenny Maybee on piano, Bill Noertker on contrabass, and a drummer TBA.
Bassist/composer Bill Noertker has been writing and performing new music in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1987. Noertker has studied with the renowned cornetist Bobby Bradford, composition under the tutelage of Aldo Ryzy-Ryzky while a member of the experimental art rock band, Bardo. In the late 1990s, Noertker traveled to Europe, to soak up the culture and play music. In the year 2001 he formed his own group, Noertker's Moxie, as a forum for his thematic compositions. Since that time he has been exploring the relationship between the visual and the aural with a series of suites inspired by the works of visual artists such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Pablo Picasso, architect Antoni Gaudí, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, sculptor David Beck, and others. Since 2001 Noertker has composed 12 suites of music for Noertker's Moxie, including a score for David Beck’s short film “Animatique.”
David Beck is a major American artist. He has been creating intimately-scaled moving sculptures since the 70s. His most recent work, MVSEVM, is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's permanent collection. Commissioned by the museum, David Beck created MVSEVM, an exquisitely crafted world in miniature; the work reflects the neoclassical architecture of the building, from the 1840s when it was the U.S. Patent Office to the present day. Other works by Beck have also been shown at the Smithsonian, including L'Opera and Movie Palace.
Noertker first collaborated with Beck when he was commissioned to score Beck's movie "Animatique" which was shown at Beck's 2004 exhibit at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York.
Go-go Fight Master w/
Aaron Bennett, John Finkbeiner,
Vijay Anderson,
Lisa Mezzacappa(Saxophonist
Aaron Bennett's Power Quartet)
"Heavy-Metal-Country-Jazz" that embraces both the avant-garde & the straight-ahead. Drawing on all forms of world, popular and folk music to create their refreshingly unique sound. Go-go Fightmaster is led by San Francisco Bay Area composer/saxophonist
Aaron Bennett.
Aaron Bennett graduated from Cal Arts with a masters degree in Jazz Performance in 1995. At Cal Arts he studied extensively with Ismael Wadada Leo Smith. He currently plays music in the bay area as an active member of the following bands: Marco Eneidi's American Jungle Orchestra, The Scott Looney, Full Throttle, Go-Go Fightmaster, electro-magnetic trans-personal orchestra, the Vijay Anderson Quartet.
Vijay Anderson has had the pleasure of performing/recording with Lynn Johnston, Adam Lane’s Full Throttle Orchestra, Musical Genius, Baculum,
Aaron Bennett’s Go-Go Fightmaster, The Facing East Dance Company, the Adam Lane Trio (featuring Vinny Golia), Josh Allen, Marco Eneidi , the Smith Dobson Jr. Quartet, and the Dystemic Octet. He holds a B.A. in music from San Francisco State University . At SFSU, he studied with Eddie Marshall, Francis Wong, Wayne Wallace and Hafez Modirzadeh. He continues to play in various groups throughout the bay area as well as leading his own group, The Vijay Anderson Quartet.
Able-bodied and addle-brained, right-handed engineer and multi-instrumentalist John Finkbeiner hails from Waukegan , Illinois . John has studied engineering with Myles Boisen; guitar with Morris Acevedo, Myles Boisen, and Richard Festinger, and drinking straw with
Aaron Bennett.
John plays or has played with, among others, these bands: Guerrilla Hi-Fi, Adam Lane's Full Throttle Orchestra, The Highlander II's, Sir Dance-a-lot, Aaron Novik's Gubbish, The United Brassworkers' Front, Go-go Fightmaster, The Quiet Storm All-Stars, The Electro-Magnetic Trans-personal Orchestra, The Scenty-Gents, Optimist International, Sparklecock, etc.
Lisa Mezzacappa's music lives in the intersection of improvisation and composition. Her projects as a doublebassist, composer, curator and collaborator explore new contexts for developing interactive musical languages and experiences. She has studied with Michael Formanek, Henry Threadgill and Steve Coleman, and has performed and workshopped with the Sun Ra Arkestra, Meredith Monk, Bob Moses, Myra Melford, Art Baron, Terry Riley and David Murray, among others. She was artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2006) and
the Banff International Jazz Workshop (2000), holds an MA in ethnomusicology from UC Berkeley (2003), and a BA in music from the University of Virginia (1997). She is composer-in-residence at
Djerassi Resident Artists Program in fall 2008. Lisa has been awarded grants from American Composers Forum, the City of Oakland and Meet the Composer. She currently performs in nearly a dozen original jazz, pop and chamber ensembles in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives.
Cost: $12/$6