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Tom's Place
3111 Deakin Street
Berkeley
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Gilbert Isbin (lute) and Scott Walton (cb)
Sten Sandell (pno), Gino Robair (perc) and Scott Walton (cb)

Audio samples on which musicians at this event appear:

Thursday, Mar 6 2014 7:30 PM

CSU East Bay Music Recital Hall MB 1055
Music and Business Building Rm 1055
Cal State East Bay Hayward Campus
25800 Carlos Bee Bl
Hayward CA 94542

Community out-reach and in-reach in action! Recital Hall, MB1055: Program: Wind Horse by Pauline Oliveros; Well I Like It by Chris Luttrell; 7 Hums 7 Times by Tom Bickley; From Unknown Silences by Pauline Oliveros; Ragtime by Igor Stravinsky; Japan by Karlheinz Stockhausen

Audio samples on which musicians at this event appear:

Thursday, Mar 6 2014 8:00 PM

Luggage Store New Music Series
Outsound co-Presents @ The Luggage Store Gallery
1007 Market St.
SF
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8pm Conan the Barbiturate
Conan The Barbiturate is Josh Martin & André Custodio
9pm Power Stations
Will Northlich-Redmond-guitar
Nick Obando-saxophone
Rob Pumpelly-drums

Thursday, Mar 6 2014 8:00 PM

Mills College Littlefield Concert Hall
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland
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Mills College Signal Flow 2014

Performances and Installations by Department of Music Graduate Students
www.Signal-Flow.org

Signal Flow is a four day music festival including four evenings of live performances and sound based art installations. This year’s festival will take place on March 6th through the 9th with performances beginning at 8:00pm Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Littlefield Concert Hall and at 4:00pm Sunday in Mills Chapel. Installations will be open to viewers starting daily at 6:30pm in Lisser Hall.

2014 Performers:
3/6 at 8PM - Littlefield Concert Hall
BILL BAIRD
BEN SALOMON
PETER SLOAN
KHALIL DOAK-ANTHONY
BRETT CARSON

3/7 at 8PM - Littlefield Concert Hall
MATEO LUGO
KATHERINE MCDONALD
Crystal Pascucci
TAURIN BARRERA
MADALYN MERKEY

3/8 at 8PM - Littlefield Concert Hall
DYLAN NEELY
JON MYERS
SHARMI BASU
PAUCHI SASAKI

3/9 at 4PM - Mills Chapel
STEPHAN HALUSKA
JULIE Y. MOON
JACOB PECK
TIM KIM

Thursday, Mar 6 2014 8:00 PM

CNMAT
1750 Arch Street
Berkeley
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Solo percussionist Joseph Van Hassel will perform a concert of new music for solo snare drum, including world premieres of works by Berkeley-born composer David Macbride and San Francisco native Janis Mercer. Also included are works by Oakland native Dan VanHassel and founding member of Percussion Group Cincinnati, Allen Otte. The program includes multiple styles of performance (fixed and interactive electronics among them) that show just how versatile this “simple” instrument truly is.

Program:
Stuart Saunders Smith, The Noble Snare
Allen Otte, What the Snare Drum Tells Me
Allen Otte, Grand and Heroic Symphony on the Birth, Life, Suffering, Death and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ
Dan VanHassel, fzzl
David Macbride, Fallen (World Premiere)
Janis Mercer, X (World Premiere)
Herbert Brun, Just Seven for Drum

Named an “emerging artist” of 2013 by the international Percussive Arts Society, Joseph Van Hassel is rapidly becoming one of the most exciting young percussion performers and educators in the field. Performance highlights include Carnegie Hall, the Cincinnati MusicNow Festival, the Percussive Arts Society International Convention, the International Tuba Euphonium Conference, and the Hindemith Center in Switzerland. He has performed with numerous orchestras and big bands throughout the Midwest and East coast, and on tour with the 2008 Juniper Chamber Music Festival. A versatile artist in many genres, Joseph has performed or recorded with the Percussion Group Cincinnati, Roland Vazquez, Bernard Woma, and the Ethos Percussion Group. He has worked with composers Steve Reich, Joseph Schwantner, William Bolcom, Erik Griswold, David Gillingham, Jennifer Higdon, John Corigliano, Matthew Burtner, Jere Hutcheson, and Libby Larsen. Active in the performance of new repertoire, Joseph has individually commissioned and premiered works by Stuart Saunders Smith, Dary John Mizelle, David Macbride, Jenny Bernard Merkowitz, Dan VanHassel, and Michael Barnhart. He can be heard on recordings for the Mode, Equilibrium, and Ohio Percussion record labels, and is currently recording his debut solo CD. Joseph is on the percussion faculty at Ohio University and Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp.

Joseph earned degrees from Ohio University, the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and the Hartt School. He endorses Innovative Percussion sticks and mallets. For more information please visit his website: josephvanhassel.com.

Thursday, Mar 6 2014 9:00 PM

Duende
468 19th Street
Oakland
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The Gench Music Series at Duende presents…

IOS + VOZZT + DIMUZIO


ILLUSION OF SAFETY

Daniel Burke (b.1960) has been making experimental music in the Chicago area since 1983. He also works with photography, graphic design, and video. Initially inspired to manipulate sound by witnessing the final performances of Throbbing Gristle in 1981, he was the founding member of Illusion Of Safety in 1983. He has performed over 350 concerts since 1992 in Europe and North America. Notable performances include No Fun 2008, the Wroclaw Industrial Music Festival 2009, Sonic Circuits in 2010, and a collaboration with Shen Wei Dance Arts performed live with 18 dancers and a 7 speaker surround sound system at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in June 2011. He is currently Djing for WNUR at Northwestern University Evanston/Chicago hosting the "Voice of Reason" broadcast on Mondays from 2-6:30PM. Burke has collaborated with artists such as Jon Mueller, Randy Greif, Darin Gray, Zev, Cheer-Accident, Jim O'Rourke, Thomas Dimuzio, Kevin Drumm, and Jeff Jerman. He has released over 30 full length records as Illusion Of Safety or with various collaborators, on labels such as Complacency, Die Stadt, Experimedia, Odd Size, Silent, Soleilmoon, Staalplaat, Tesco, Waystyx, Drone, and has forthcoming releases on Chicago's No Part Of It and UK's Cold Spring.

Daniel Burke is currently working with diverse instrumentation including, digital and modular synthesis, computer composition, samples, field recordings, and highly amplified handled objects. He uses improvised and composed structures containing material that confounds memory and stimulates perception. The resulting music encompasses broken sound, disturbed ambience and unfiltered beauty that collectively evokes an awareness of the ineffable. The sound is an interactive language between listener and performer, open to interpretation. It is a bridge between humanity and technology, between music and noise.

http://www.illusionofsafety.net/

http://www.danieljamesburke.net/

http://www.mixcloud.com/soundoferror/

https://soundcloud.com/bzurke

VOZZT

Vozzt is an electro-acoustic duo, based in Oakland + San Francisco, CA, making music which straddles the disciplines of improvisation and song form. Jeanie-Aprille Tang is an audio visual artist + electro-acoustic composer/improviser, and member of improvisation trio Dapplegray, and IMA, a duo of alternative time perceptions. Her instruments are hardware electronics and plexiglass. Evelyn Davis is an improvisor, inside pianist/pianist, organist, composer, and songwriter, and vox/keyboardist for Cheer-Accident (Chicago).

http://auxyuxcrux.com/

http://soundcloud.com/e-davis-1

http://www.cheer-accident.com/

Thomas Dimuzio

Thomas Dimuzio curates the Gench Music Series at Duende and has released music over the last 25 years on labels including ReR Megacorp, RRR, Asphodel, Seeland, No Fun, Odd Size, Sonoris, New World Records, Isounderscore, Record Label Records, Drone, and Gench. “If King Crimson had studied under Edgard Varese.” —The Wire

http://www.thomasdimuzio.com

http://www.gench.com

Friday, Mar 7 2014 7:00 PM

Center for New Music
55 Taylor St
SF
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This will be Mozart’s classic opera as you have never seen it before, stripped to its bare essentials and explored in fresh and exciting ways. This production features brand-new English dialog written by director Ted Zoldan, with the original incredible music.

Tickets include a reception with the cast featuring our world famous Waffles.

Waffle Opera was founded by a group of friends who realized that fine singing, acting, and breakfast foods were even better when offered up together. As young artists in a time when many opera companies are closing their doors, we feel it’s important to create our own opportunities and advocate for the art form we love. In this spirit, we present our brand of intimate, exciting opera, featuring the rising stars of the Bay Area.

The Cast:
Tamino: Mike Desnoyers
Pamina: Morgan Harrington
Papageno: Jordan Eldredge
Sarastro: Jason Sarten
Queen: Leslie Katter
Papagena: Lora Libby
1st Lady/1st Priest: Gillian Watson
2nd Lady/2nd Priest: Annie Hepburn Smith
3rd Lady/3rd Priest: Jamie MacDonald
1st Spirit: Lindsey Rae Johnson
2nd Spirit: Adeliz Araiza
3rd Spirit: Elayne Juten
Monostatos: Alan Briones
1st Armed Man: Matt Brooks

Director: Ted Zoldan
Music Director: Ben Malkevitch

Friday, Mar 7 2014 8:00 PM

Mills College Littlefield Concert Hall
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland
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Mills College Signal Flow 2014

Performances and Installations by Department of Music Graduate Students

www.Signal-Flow.org

The Mills College Music Department Graduate Program presents Signal Flow, an annual spring festival showcasing new student works in music and sound art. For over 75 years, Mills College has maintained an international reputation as a site for innovation and experimentalism in music. In its past and present, Mills counts among its students and faculty key innovators in areas as diverse as electronic, electro-acoustic and computer music, installation based sound art, improvised music, multi-media performance, instrument building, idiomatic instrumental composition and more. Notable graduates and faculty include Maryanne Amacher, Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, Luciano Berio, Anthony Braxton, Dave Brubeck, Lou Harrison, Annea Lockwood, Darius Milhaud, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick, David Tudor, and Iannis Xenakis. Over the course of four days of programming, the public is invited to sample the latest offerings by student composers, performers, and artists who have taken up this legacy and who in turn are charting new territories of their own. Signal Flow takes place throughout the lush campus of Mills College. All events are free and open to the public.

3/7 at 8PM - Littlefield Concert Hall
MATEO LUGO
KATHERINE MCDONALD
Crystal Pascucci
TAURIN BARRERA
MADALYN MERKEY

Friday, Mar 7 2014 8:00 PM

Artists' Television Access
992 Valencia
SF
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New music/sound + film/video collaborations by:
Suki O'Kane + John Davis
Jason Hoopes + Azin Seraj
Marielle Jakobsons + Kirthi Nath

with film scores performed live by:
Emily Packard, violin
Mia Bella D'Augelli, violin
Cory Wright, clarinet
Nava Dunkelman, percussion
Jeanie-Aprille Tang, electronics

Mission Eye & Ear is a live cinema series that brings together Bay Area composers and improvisers with filmmakers and video artists drawn from ATA’s diverse and geographically sprawling family, to create new works performed live at ATA by a stellar ensemble of local musicians.

Composer-performers Jason Hoopes, Suki O’Kane and Marielle Jakobsons represent a rich cross-section of the local creative music scene, influenced by electronic music, acoustic improv, noise, avant-garde jazz, alt-rock and theatrical musical traditions of Asia. Filmmaker/media artists John Davis, Azin Seraj and Kirthi Nath explore cultural identity, documentary storytelling, dreamlike cinescapes and formal abstraction in a wide range of narrative and experimental works.

This March event is the first in a series of three Mission Eye & Ear events this year, organized by Bay Area musician and curator Lisa Mezzacappa with ATA. The first edition of Mission Eye & Ear, in 2011, commissioned nine composer-filmmaker teams to create new works. The series was remounted in a day-long marathon at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2012, and has since traveled to cities in Italy and Germany, where local musicians provide live scores for films commissioned for the series.

$7-10 Sliding Scale Admission

Visit: www.missioneyeear.com

Mission Eye & Ear is supported by a grant from the Zellerbach Family Foundation.

Saturday, Mar 8 2014 9:00 AM

Totally Intense Fractal Mindgaze Hut
671 24th St.
Apt. 1
Oakland
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Dominique Leone Band
Kyle Bruckmann - oboe
Maryclare Brzytwa - flute/electronics
Mark Clifford - percussion
Jordan Glenn - drums
Jason Hoopes - bass
Matt Inglas - clarinets
Kasey Knudsen - alto sax
Robert Lopez - percussion
Aaron Novik - clarinets

Jesse Rimler

Heatwarmer (Seattle)

Doors 8pm, Show 9pm / $5 - $10

Saturday, Mar 8 2014 8:00 PM

Mills College Littlefield Concert Hall
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Mills College Signal Flow 2014

Performances and Installations by Department of Music Graduate Students

www.Signal-Flow.org

The Mills College Music Department Graduate Program presents Signal Flow, an annual spring festival showcasing new student works in music and sound art. For over 75 years, Mills College has maintained an international reputation as a site for innovation and experimentalism in music. In its past and present, Mills counts among its students and faculty key innovators in areas as diverse as electronic, electro-acoustic and computer music, installation based sound art, improvised music, multi-media performance, instrument building, idiomatic instrumental composition and more. Notable graduates and faculty include Maryanne Amacher, Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, Luciano Berio, Anthony Braxton, Dave Brubeck, Lou Harrison, Annea Lockwood, Darius Milhaud, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick, David Tudor, and Iannis Xenakis. Over the course of four days of programming, the public is invited to sample the latest offerings by student composers, performers, and artists who have taken up this legacy and who in turn are charting new territories of their own. Signal Flow takes place throughout the lush campus of Mills College. All events are free and open to the public.

3/8 at 8PM at Littlefield Concert Hall
DYLAN NEELY
JON MYERS
SHARMI BASU
PAUCHI SASAKI

Saturday, Mar 8 2014 8:00 PM

Center for New Music
55 Taylor St
SF
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Vardan Ovsepian – Live in San Francisco: Solo Jazz Piano

“I have never heard any musician quite like him in terms of harmonic awareness and melodic power” – PETER ERSKINE
Emerging jazz great Vardan Ovsepian makes his San Francisco debut performing his acclaimed solo piano works, along with several world premieres. Hailed by the likes of Peter Erskine, Brad Mehldau, Mick Goodrick, and Frank Carlberg as a fresh and important voice within the modern jazz scene, Mr. Ovsepian’s brilliant synthesis of classical and jazz idioms reminds some listeners of Keith Jarrett, thus evoking a style reminiscent of “third stream”.
Vardan Ovsepian was educated at Yerevan State Conservatory, Estonian Music Academy, Helsinki Jazz Conservatory and Berklee College of Music. Mr. Ovsepian currently resides in the Los Angeles area, where he is a frequent guest at Blue Whale, in addition to teaching, composing and conducting jazz improvisation workshops when he is not on tour.www.vardanovsepian.com
This concert is part of the Bay Area Performances Series sponsored by Pomegranate Music

Sunday, Mar 9 2014 4:00 PM

Mills College Chapel
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Mills College Signal Flow 2014

Performances and Installations by Department of Music Graduate Students

www.Signal-Flow.org

The Mills College Music Department Graduate Program presents Signal Flow, an annual spring festival showcasing new student works in music and sound art. For over 75 years, Mills College has maintained an international reputation as a site for innovation and experimentalism in music. In its past and present, Mills counts among its students and faculty key innovators in areas as diverse as electronic, electro-acoustic and computer music, installation based sound art, improvised music, multi-media performance, instrument building, idiomatic instrumental composition and more. Notable graduates and faculty include Maryanne Amacher, Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, Luciano Berio, Anthony Braxton, Dave Brubeck, Lou Harrison, Annea Lockwood, Darius Milhaud, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick, David Tudor, and Iannis Xenakis. Over the course of four days of programming, the public is invited to sample the latest offerings by student composers, performers, and artists who have taken up this legacy and who in turn are charting new territories of their own. Signal Flow takes place throughout the lush campus of Mills College. All events are free and open to the public.

3/9 at 4:00 PM Mills Chapel
STEPHAN HALUSKA
JULIE Y. MOON
JACOB PECK
TIM KIM

Sunday, Mar 9 2014 8:00 PM

Berkeley Arts
2133 University Avenue
Berkeley
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8:00pm Guinea Pig
Tony Passarell - saxophone, trumpet, keyboards
Rent Romus - saxophones, Doug Carroll - cello, Timothy Orr - drums
9:00pm Microdecibel
Lucio Menegon - guitars, Ross Hammond - guitars, Shawn Hale - bass, Dax Compise - drums

Wild and wooly improvised music - The group was specifically formed for performance presented at the late great Dark Circle Lounge Series in the mid ninties. Now, every 10 years Central Valley stalwart Tony Passarell and Rent Romus meet to feed the Guinea Pig and play a little sonic tug of war embroiled in playful blasts of melodic bliss.


Microdecibel is the improvisation ensemble of NYC & Joshua Tree resident Lucio Menegon (guitars) with Sacramento's finest Ross Hammond (guitars), Shawn Hale (bass) and Dax Compise (drum kit). This particular ensemble has experimented with energetic adaptations of Menegon's structured "microscores" mixed with free improvisation and the Americana folk songs.

Audio samples on which musicians at this event appear:

Monday, Mar 10 2014 8:00 PM

Duende
468 19th Street
Oakland
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Oakland Freedom Jazz Society presents

Gangsa: Music for Electroacoustic Percussion by Chris Brown with members of the Lightbulb Ensemble including Ryan Jobes, Brian Baumbusch, Nava Dunkelman, Scott Siler and Peter Sloan.

The Lightbulb Ensemble is a newly formed composers collective that champions experimental music, instrument building, and contemporary gamelan. The ensemble emerged out of the culture of new music surrounding Mills College, as well as the Bay Area's longstanding Balinese Gamelan Sekar Jaya.

Chris Brown, composer/pianist/improvisor, is also a professor of music at Mills. His music most often includes the close interaction of acoustic and electronic instruments. Gangsa (2010) is one such piece that features four Philippine flat-gongs playing rhythmic patterns that phase while a computer creates interlocking transformations of their sounds in real time. The program will also include a short set of improvisations for live computer and percussion.

http://cbmuse.com
http://lightbulbgarden.com/lightbulb_ensemble/

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Aaron Bennett's Electro-Magnetic Trans-Personal Orchestra featuring Aaron Bennett, Rob Ewing, Jeff Hobbs, Darren Johnston, Joe Lasqo, Bob Marsh, Lisa Mezzacappa, Crystal Pascucci)

http://thebaybridged.com/2013/02/12/aaron-bennetts-electro-magnetic-trans-personal-orchestra-musicians-union-hall-21013/#.UvqrFl4b9hY

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Darren Johnston Trio +1

http://darrenjohnstonmusic.com/

------------------------- PLUS ------------------
VAMP Vintage Art & Music for the People will be sharing records(vinyl) from 6:30-8pm and between the live music. Everything Vamp shares will be for sale.

Tickets are $10-15 (suggested donation) - 100% goes to the musicians

Audio samples on which musicians at this event appear:

Monday, Mar 10 2014 8:00 PM

Center for New Music
55 Taylor St
SF
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The Soundscraper project, the hair-brained brainchild of composer Thom Blum, will premiere Capsule 1 -inside/outside, a continuous, two-hour, structured improvisation based on live crowdsourced sound feeds.

Soundscraper performances rely on people participating (volunteering), worldwide, providing live sound streams over the Internet from their environments to a mixer-performer. The mixer-performer “re-streams,” processes, and diffuses the incoming sounds, live, within the performance venue.

Inside the venue the live sound feeds are balanced and blended with processed variations of themselves. There is control over the “dry/wet” mix of the inputs, so the mixed soundscape inside the venue will range from being the pure, raw, input sounds to being a sound that bears little or no resemblance to the input.

A Soundscraper score (more of a schedule) gives the participants a sequence of descriptions of “place-sounds,” as well as the times at which the sounds are requested. The types of sound environments that are requested change and progress over the course of a performance. The mixer-performer attempts to shape (more like herd or sweep) the incoming sounds into a kind of narrativemusical expression, with the score/schedule being the sound map. This is “soundscraping” – the mixing, processing, diffusing, and structuring of sounds being streamed in, live, from the world at large.

The two-hour performance can be experienced either seated or roaming the space.

Monday, Mar 10 2014 9:15 PM

the Roxie
3117 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

SAN FRANCISCO PREMIERE! FILMMAKERS IN PERSON! On Ganymede, it is thought that volcanic vents supply the necessary power to fuel life. This film imagines unknown extra-terrestrial life forms engaged in ritualistic aquatic dance beneath a sky of ice. The resulting way of life is depicted as fluctuating pulses of energy abstracted beyond conventional consciousness. The process and visual composition range from video simulations of the cosmos, multiple exposures of light sources, buried material that developed hypnotic patterns of decomposed dyes, and several single frame animations consisting of intricately cut, rotating mandalas of color, found footage layered with billowing painted shapes, and mysterious organic bodies of matter. JONAS REINHARDT is also celebrating the publication of GANYMEDE as a vinyl record, poster and DVD set from Constellation Tatsu. Dirs: Various. 2014. Digital. ~80 mins. 9:15PM

Tuesday, Mar 11 2014 7:49 PM

Center for New Music
55 Taylor St
SF
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sfSoundSalonSeries presents:

Joan La Barbara


A program of solo voice, group improvisations, and a performance of Angels, Demons and Other Muses (2010) with sfSoundGroup.


Angels, Demons and Other Muses is part of an opera in-progress, which La Barbara has been engaged in composing over the past 6 years. The work integrates both her signature vocal techniques and their transfer to other instruments, involving musicians onstage to embody certain aspects of characters, and exploring language within the compositional process. Drawing inspiration from Virginia Woolf and Edgar Allen Poe (writers whose work she has studied since grammar school), dream fragments from Joseph Cornell’s journals, and nature-based architectural geometries (including the swirls and spirals of Antoni Gaudí and Frank Lloyd Wright), La Barbara is creating an abstract work which endeavors to expose the artist’s struggle, externalizing the internal dialogue and the genesis of the act of producing art.

La Barbara states, “My compositional process often begins with stream-of-consciousness writing, generating a list or series of words and phrases about a selected topic or theme. I then read through what I have written, finding the music that these words inspire in me, generating sketches and constructing the musical material and overall form of the work, setting my impressions of images, translating from words to sound in much the same manner that I have generated multi-layered ‘sound paintings’ inspired by visual art. In ‘ is part of an opera in-progress, which La Barbara has been engaged in composing over the past 6 years. The work integrates both her signatu’, I am creating my own libretto, which is woven into the sonic texture. For this performance the musicians will be seated within the audience. Thus, the entire space will be the ‘stage’. I am also integrating spatial movement from the acoustic instruments with those in the sonic atmosphere, the soundscape environment combining layers of voices, natural and instrumental sounds which will surround and flow over the audience.”


Joan La Barbara composer, performer, sound artist, and actor, is renowned for her unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques, influencing generations of composers and singers. Awards and prizes include: Premio Internazionale “Demetrio Stratos”; DAAD-Berlin Artist-in-Residency; Civitella Ranieri, Guggenheim and 7 National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and numerous commissions. Composing for multiple voices, chamber ensembles, theater, orchestra, interactive technology, and soundscores for dance, video and film, including a score for voice and electronics for Sesame Street, her multi-layered textural compositions were presented at Brisbane Biennial, Festival d'Automne à Paris, Warsaw Autumn, MaerzMusik Berlin, and Lincoln Center. Artistic Director of the multi-year Carnegie Hall series “When Morty Met John” and co-founder of performing composers-collective Ne(x)tworks. She recently worked with artist Matthew Barney on his new film project “River of Fundament”. Recordings of her work include: "ShamanSong" (New World), “Sound Paintings”, "Voice is the Original Instrument" and “73 Poems” (Lovely Music) her collaboration with text-artist Kenneth Goldsmith, which was included in The American Century Part II: Soundworks at The Whitney Museum. Exploring ways of immersing the audience in her music, La Barbara placed musicians and actors throughout Greenwich House Music School for her music/theater piece Journeys and Observable Events, allowing the audience to explore the building, unveiling theatrical and sonic events, and seated the American Composers Orchestra around and among the audience in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel auditorium, building her sonic painting “in solitude this fear is lived”, inspired by Agnes Martin’s minimalist drawings. Current studies include Michael Beckett’s Experimental Workshop and Austin Pendleton’s Advanced Scene Study classes at HB Studios. La Barbara served on the faculties of California Institute of the Arts, Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, The College of Santa Fe, The University of New Mexico, visiting lecturer at Princeton University, and currently on the Composition Faculty of New York University’s Department of Music and Performing Arts Professionals, as well as maintaining a private studio in New York City. La Barbara is a composer and publisher member of ASCAP and is composing a new opera exploring the artistic process, interior dialogue, and sounds within the mind. For more information, visit joanlabarbara.com.


MUSICIANS
Joan La Barbara, voice
Monica Scott, cello
Brendan Lai-Tong, trombone
Benjamin Kreith, violin
John Ingle, saxophone
Matt Ingalls, clarinet
Evelyn Davis, piano
Tom Dambly, trumpet
Mark Clifford, vibraphone
Kyle Bruckmann, oboe/english horn

Audio samples on which musicians at this event appear:

Tuesday, Mar 11 2014 9:00 PM

Uptown Nightclub
1928 Telegraph Ave
Oakland
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Active Music Series presents Eat the Sun + Tonal Masher + Tiberius

Eat the Sun Gretchen: Jude - koto; Noah Phillips - guitar; Jason Hoopes - bass. Long-form gently undulating melodic lines weave through meditative sound textures changing slowly like clouds unfurling and expanding on a sunny afternoon during an eclipse. As you listen, body in the grass and eyes in the sky, your spirit takes a transcendental meander through calmly exploding sensation with passages of noise. Hear some of their music.

Tonal Masher is the saxophone & electronics alter ego of Aram Shelton. Much like the anagram which creates the name, in this solo project Shelton re-arranges and extends his acoustic sounds via processing. Layers of tones and harmonics are combined with extended techniques including multiphonics and circular breathing.

Tiberius is primarily a spontaneously creative unit comprised of Dominic Cramp (Evangelista, Borful Tang, Lord Tang, Vulcanus 68) playing organ and electronics and Mike Guarino (Sir Richard Bishop, Oaxacan) playing drums, guitar, and electronics. Between them they have performed throughout the United States, Europe and South America with such artists as Nels Cline, Richard Bishop, Bill Gould, Mike Watt, John Dietrich, Carla Bozulich, Shahzad Ismaily, Ches Smith and Damo Suzuki. Listen to Tiberius

Active Music Series - Second Tuesdays at the Uptown
Music at 9 No cover, donations accepted.

Wednesday, Mar 12 2014 8:00 PM

Berkeley Arts
2133 University Avenue
Berkeley
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8 pm JASA Quartet 9 pm Davis - Xinh duo

8 pm
JASA Quartet
Andrew Jamieson - Keyboards
Joshua Marshall - Saxophones
Aaron Oppenheim - Laptop
Shanna Sordahl - Cello

JASA Quartet creates moments of sound with a telepathic focus that transcends sensory experience. Their purely musical dialogue plunges the depths of meaning while tapping into pre-verbal sonic communication. JASA's non-hierarchical dynamics present a radically democratic vision of time, experienced equally by performer and audience.

9 pm
Evelyn Davis - piano
Xo Xinh - electronics

Xo Xinh is a Vietnamese electroacoustic music composer, performer, improviser, and educator. Most of his works aim to re-contextualize the essence of traditional instruments through spectral processing and interactive manipulation of the acoustic sound by the computer, as well as to explore the transformation of traditional music through the contemporary and experimental medium. He received his MFA in Electronic Music at Mills College in 2012 and has performed his music since then throughout the U.S., and in Europe, Australia, and South America. He is currently an Instructor of Electronic Music at Evergreen Valley College.

Evelyn Davis is a Bay Area-based improvisor, inside pianist/pianist, organist, vocalist, composer, and songwriter. After spending her life unto late teens as a classical pianist, she intensively studied jazz, orchestral composition, improvisation, and, for many years, has been an integral member of a variegated group of bands in genres ranging from highly-composed progressive rock to chamber pop to folk. Her primary focuses are psychoacoustic spectral phenomenon within dronal improvisation, the timbral properties of the inside piano, for which she creates assistive mallets, toys, and tools out of wood, metal, and rubber, and thorough exploration of the outer boundaries of electro-acoustic improvisation and songwriting. Currently she is vocalist and keyboardist for the genre-destroying band Cheer-Accident, bastions of the Chicago avant-garde scene since 1983, with whom she performed at the Rock in Opposition Festival in Carmeaux, France in September 2013. She is founder of and organist for the ensemble Drone Church, and intermittently she performs with large- scale Bay Area improvisation ensembles (such as OrcheSperry, Moechestra!), and with Bay Area notables such as Fred Frith, Phillip Greenlief, and Tzadik's Aprille Tang, with whom she forms the electro-acoustic improvisation & neo-lieder duo VOZZT.

8pm to 10:30pm, 2133 University Ave

Wednesday, Mar 12 2014 8:00 PM

Meridian Gallery
535 Powell Street
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

The FKM Trio (Adam Fong - contrabass, John Kennedy - percussion, Brent Miller - guitar) perform new works by each of the ensemble members.

Adam Fong is an active cultural entrepreneur, and a composer, performer and producer of new music. He has helped build two innovative arts service organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area: Emerging Arts Professionals (Co-Founder 2008; Director) and the Center for New Music (Co-Founder 2012; Executive Director). Fong received the MFA in Music Composition at California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with James Tenney and Wadada Leo Smith. As Associate Director of Other Minds (2006–2012), he produced six editions of the annual Other Minds Festival and many special projects. Fong's own compositions have been performed internationally in Auckland, London, Berlin, Tübingen and Darmstadt, at many US universities, and throughout California, by performers including the two-piano team Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa. Fong also holds a master’s degree from Stanford University (English).
http://www.shaketheair.com/

Composer-performer-conductor John Kennedy has brought to North America important orchestral and opera repertoire from the world’s most prominent living composers. As Director of Orchestral Activities and Resident Conductor at Spoleto Festival USA, Kennedy has led premieres for Kaija Saariaho, Wolfgang Rihm, Toshio Hosokawa, John Luther Adams, and Thomas Adès. Praise by The New York Times for his ‘winning consistency and unflagging energy’ echoes critical accolades given him by Opera News, Grammophone, and others. Through his founding and leadership of Santa Fe New Music, his advocacy has brought ‘[a] deep community immersion of new music.’

Brent Miller (b. 1978) is a composer, performer, and arts administrator based in San Francisco, CA. He studied composition at the University of Arkansas with Robert Mueller and University of Missouri-Kansas City with James Mobberley and Paul Rudy. Recent projects include works for Rova Saxophone Quartet, violinist Eric km Clark (EAR Unit), Dither Electric Guitar Quartet, and Sqwonk. He has received grants from Zellerbach Family Foundation and American Composers Forum to fund his work. Brent is active in the arts administration field founding and serving as Managing Director for The Center for New Music in San Francisco, a work/performance space that supports creative music, as well as managing Rova:Arts, a non-profit organization that supports Rova Saxophone Quartet. He also has worked with Other Minds, helping to produce the annual Other Minds Festival, and is a founding member of The Collected, a group dedicated to the advancement of new music.

Wednesday, Mar 12 2014 9:00 PM

Duende
468 19th Street
Oakland
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Phillip Greenlief / Scott Amendola Duo

Phillip Greenlief - sax
Scott Amendola - drums

Audio samples on which musicians at this event appear:

Thursday, Mar 13 2014 8:00 PM

Royce Gallery
2901 Mariposa Street #18
San Francisco

ROOM: Joan La Barbara and Pamela Z
A shared evening of extended voice & electronics

Pamela Z Arts' intimate avant chamber series is proud to present a shared evening of experimental vocal works by Joan La Barbara and Pamela Z as the first event in the 2014 ROOM Series season. Each will perform solo works, and the two will perform an improvised duo work.

Thursday, Mar 13 2014 8:00 PM

Luggage Store New Music Series
Outsound co-Presents @ The Luggage Store Gallery
1007 Market St.
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

8pm: SING Sang SUNG
Ron Heglin, Bob Marsh
9pm The Holly Martins
Kasey Knudsen- Alto Saxophone, Eric Vogler - Guitar, Lorin Benedict - Voice


The Holly Martins (named after the main character in the classic postwar film, The Third Man) is a trio of Bay Area musicians dedicated to exploring the boundaries of jazz-infused improvised music, but without the trappings of a traditional "rhythm section". This configuration requires each individual to simultaneously take on multiple roles typically assigned individual players (soloist versus accompanist), thereby promoting more open-ended explorations of the material.
"The inspired combination of musical elements here results in a sound that's not only fresh and original, but far more accessible than the concept might suggest on paper." - The One True Dead Angel

Audio samples on which musicians at this event appear:

Thursday, Mar 13 2014 8:00 PM

SFJAZZ Center
201 Franklin Street (at Fell)
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Howard Wiley plays Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz To Come

Friday, Mar 14 2014 7:30 PM

Berkeley Art Museum
2626 Bancroft Way
Berkeley
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

In 1976, the celebrated experimental singer, composer, and sound artist Joan La Barbara presented her “Circular Song” at BAM/PFA (then called the University Art Museum). She describes it as a rigorous process piece that explores the "circular singing" technique as well as split-tone multiphonics. Now, thirty-eight years later, La Barbara recreates “Circular Song” for this special L@TE event, as part of a rare program of her innovative and beautiful vocal compositions. She also sings her recent work "Solitary Journeys of the Mind" (2011), a real-time exploration of the art of composition, weaving her own personal sonic world, and "Windows" (2013), which layers her signature vocal techniques with natural and electronic sounds, creating otherworldly dreamscapes inspired by the dreams and visions of Joseph Cornell.

Please note that there will be only limited seating at this season’s L@TE events.

Friday, Mar 14 2014 8:00 PM

Totally Intense Fractal Mindgaze Hut
671 24th St.
Apt. 1
Oakland
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Jason Hoopes / Jordan Glenn duo

Rhythm section for Jack O' The Clock, Fred Frith Trio, Dominique Leone, Sarah Wilson, Host Family, and many many others fly free on their own. So tight, they're often mistaken as one person...

Jordan Glenn - drums
Jason Hoopes - bass


The Ruminations
Christina Stanley - violin/effects
Markus Hunt - double bass
Bob Marsh - cello/effects
Mark Pino - drums/percussion
Rent Romus - saxophones/toys


Daniel Blomquist

Benjamin Ethan Tinker/Tara Sreekrishnan Duo
Benjamin Ethan Tinker - electronics
Tara Sreekrishnan - piano

DUMPTRUCK

Audio samples on which musicians at this event appear:

Saturday, Mar 15 2014 2:00 PM

Center for New Music
55 Taylor St
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

film@C4NM: Jazz Masters

From the Art Ensemble to Tom Ze, from Ascension to Zappa: FILM@C4NM presents some of the world's most compelling music documentaries and performance films. Screening astonishing sounds from around the planet, this film series is expressly designed to open music lovers' eyes and ears even further.

All shows are 2pm weekend matinees
Refreshments and special filmmaker and artists in-person
Admission: $10 General / $7 Members

This week: Jazz Masters

WHO'S CRAZY?
(1966 28 minutes Dick Fontaine)
With Ornette Coleman, David Izenson, Charles Moffatt. Ornette's trio recording a movie soundtrack in Paris in 1966: great music, candid interviews. An extraordinary document.
about the filmmaker

THE ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO: LIVE
(1981 60 minutes Bruce Ricker)
Filmed live in 1981, this is the only documentary to date devoted to the Art Ensemble. Playing at the height of their collective powers, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Famadou Don Moye, and Malachi Favors raise the roof of Chicago's Jazz Showcase; tunes include We-Bop, Promenade, On the Cote Bamako, Bedouin Village, New York Is Full of Lonely People, and Odwalla.
plus additional clips of the Art Ensemble
about the filmmaker

Saturday, Mar 15 2014 7:00 PM

Berkeley Arts
2133 University Avenue
Berkeley
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Friends of the Artist

A gathering of musicians playing their own compositions, or contemporary works, to honor the exhibit by Karin Weeder, an artist from Marseille, France, showing her paintings in the gallery from March 2 to 21. Performers are Luciano Chessa, Patti Deuter, Ron Heglin, Ben Kreith, Jerry Kuderna, Ric Louchard, Tim Perkis, Dean Santomieri, Melissa Smith, and Karin Weeder.

7pm to 9pm, 2133 University Ave.

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Saturday, Mar 15 2014 7:30 PM

Center for New Music
55 Taylor St
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Versatile guitarist and composer Karl Evangelista presents an evening of mixed ensembles showcasing his wide-ranging compositional voice and eclectic musical inclinations, influenced by the jazz avant-garde as well as experimental rock, alt-blues and contemporary chamber music.

Grex Chamber Ensemble
Karl Evangelista, electric guitar
Rei Scampavia, keyboard and voice
Robert Lopez, drums
Eli Wallace, piano

Host Family
Karl Evangelista, electric guitar
Nathan Clevenger, electric guitar
Jason Hoopes, bass
Jordan Glenn, drums

The concert includes a brief solo guitar set, a chamber set by his avant-jazz-rock band Grex, and a newly re-formed version of the two-guitar group Host Family, all featuring some of the Bay Area’s finest young improvisers and instrumentalists.

Evangelista, originally from Southern California, has studied and performed with many of the Bay Area’s heroes of improvised music, at Mills College (Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Frith), UC Berkeley (Myra Melford) and on the bandstand (Francis Wong, Phillip Greenlief).

Saturday, Mar 15 2014 7:30 PM

Meridian Gallery
535 Powell Street
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Elliott Sharp returns to the Meridian Gallery to perform a number of electroacoustic guitar pieces, including Momentum Anomaly.

"Momentum Anomaly is the next in a series formally begun with Velocity of Hue in 2003 and continuing with Quadrature and Octal: Book One and Octal:Book Two but in reality extending back to my 1984 solo recordings Ir/Rational Music 1 & 2. These volumes are in some ways sets of etudes presenting technical possibilities and manifestations of various tuning systems and extended techniques. At the same time, I would consider them among the most personal of my music: a feedback loop between formalized concepts often based on extra-musical sources and that internal alchemy that takes place as the Inner Ear and muscles of musical memory and reflex pass messages and calls-for-action back and forth at faster-than-light speeds. Many of the gestures from these past works are so much a part of my sonic DNA that they are instantly recognizable, yet here, they are re-cast through the filter of a new tuning as well as the cumulative transformations in approach and technique that the composer accretes through acts of living and reflection. Momentum Anomaly in itself has many meanings, both nominative and descriptive, deriving from such varied founts as post-quantum physics and market analyses. I present it as the many forms of flow and how they may be interrupted so as to re-form on another plane in another guise, still always flowing. Momentum Anomaly has just been released on CD on the New Atlantis label."

Squid's Ear review: http://www.squidsear.com/cgi-bin/news/newsView.cgi?newsID=1589
https://soundcloud.com/guitarplayermag/momentum-anomaly-5-excerpts


ELLIOTT SHARP is a composer, performer, and producer central to the experimental music scene in New York. He leads the projects Orchestra Carbon, Terraplane, and Tectonics and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetics to musical composition and interaction.

In October 2013, Sharp premiered the string quartets Tranzience for JACK Quartet and Mare Undarum for Sirius Quartet. In March 2013, his composition Storm Of the Eye commissioned by violin virtuoso Hilary Hahn for her Encores project was premiered. His composition Turing Test for the Neue Vocalsölisten Stuttgart premiered at the Venice Biennale October 2012 and Then Gone in December. Also in 2012, his Oneirika for the ensemble Zeitkatzer premiered at MaerzMusik Berlin and Persistence of Vision for the Sonic Visions Orchestra (conducted by Sharp) premiered at Sonic Visions Festival Reutlingen. He was commissioned by Issue Project Room to create Occam's Razor for double string-quartet for his birthday marathon E# @ 60 in 2011. In 2010, Sharp directed, wrote, and composed About Us, a science-fiction opera for all-teenage performers at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich. In 2009, his music-theater work Binibon premiered at The Kitchen. The Boreal was commissioned by the WDR Witten Festival in 2009 and premiered by JACK Quartet and Proof Of Erdös also by the WDR for Ensemble Resonanz. He has been featured at New Music Stockholm, Donaueschingen Festival, Darmstadt Festival, and Au Printemps. Sharp's work is the subject of a recent documentary film "Doing The Don't" by Bert Shapiro and he was featured on NPR All Things Considered in October 2012.

Sharp was awarded the Berlin Prize for Music Composition in 2013; a Fellowship in Music Composition from New York Foundation for the Arts in 2010; the Preis der Deutscher Schallplatten Kritiks in 2008 for the solo CD "Concert In Dachau" and in 2004 for the orchestral CD "Racing Hearts, Tessalation Row, Calling"; and in 2003, a Fellowship from the Foundation For Contemporary and Performance Art.

His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Ensemble Resonanz; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; jazz greats Jack deJohnette and Sonny Sharrock; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jahjouka.

Sharp's audio installations include Fluvial, a computerized multi-channel audiowork; Chromatine, an interactive string sculpture, and Tag, an interactive audiowork. His electroacoustic work Cryptid Fragments was included in the Bitstreams show at the Whitney Museum.

Recent CD releases from Sharp include "Momentum Anomaly for solo electroacoustic guitar; "Cut With Occam's Razor", a collection of new formal works performed by JACK and Sirius Quartets and pianist Jenny Lin; "The Age of Carbon", a 3xCD-box retrospective of his band Carbon; "Octal:Book Two" for solo 8-string guitarbass, “Binibon” - a radioplay version of his opera; and "Spectropia Suite" with the '31 Band, Debbie Harry and Sirius String Quartet. The complete discography may be found at: http://www.elliottsharp.com

Sharp has lectured or been an Artist-In-Residence at Atlantic Center for the Arts; School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Tokyo Zokei University; Music Conservatory of Beijing University; Conservatory of Cuneo, Italy; New England Conservatory; Tama Art College-Japan; Bard College; and Dartmouth College.

Saturday, Mar 15 2014 8:00 PM

Mills College Littlefield Concert Hall
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland, CA 94613

The Mills College Music Department and the Center for Contemporary Music present Mills Music Now 2013-2014:

ECLIPSE QUARTET
A concert of string quartets by women composers

Sarah Thornblade, violin
Sara Parkins, violin
Alma Lisa Fernandez, viola
Maggie Parkins, cello

Saturday, March 15, 2014
8:00 PM
Littlefield Concert Hall
http://musicnow.mills.edu

Free to Mills students, faculty, and staff
Tickets: $15 General Admission, $10 seniors, Mills Alums, and non-Mills students
Buy tickets online at
http://www.boxofficetickets.com

Mills College
Littlefield Concert Hall
5000 MacArthur Blvd.
Oakland, CA

http://www.eclipsequartet.com/

The Eclipse Quartet is an ensemble dedicated to the music of twentieth century and present day composers. The scope of their repertoire spans works from John Cage and Morton Subotnick to collaborations with the singers Beck and Caetano Veloso. Eclipse has the versatility to cross genres from works that include electronics and computer processing to the jazz compositions of Grammy Award winning pianist Billy Childs. The Quartet has performed frequently on both coasts and has participated in festivals such as the Look and Listen Festival in NYC, the Festival for New American Music in Sacramento, the Scarlatti Festival in Naples, Italy, the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Festival and the Angel City Jazz Festival and the Hear and Now Festival in Los Angeles.

The repertoire of Eclipse contains works by such dynamic composers as Roger Reynolds, Julia Wolfe, Ben Johnston, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Annie Gosfield, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Philip Glass, John King and Lois V. Vierk. They have premiered new works by Zeena Parkins, Carla Kihlstedt, Justin Haynes, Gernot Wolfgang, Stephen Cohn and David Jaffe.

Eclipse has recorded the string quartets of Zeena Parkins for the Tzadik label and Morton Feldman’s epic Piano And String Quartet piece with pianist Vicki Ray on Bridge Records. In June 2013 Eclipse released a disc of three works for percussion and string quartet with percussionist William Winant on New World Records as recipients of the Aaron Copland Fund for Music Recording Grant. In Winter of 2014 the MicroFest label will release Ruminations featuring Eclipse’s recording of Ben Johnston’s Revised Standards.

The Eclipse Quartet have been Artists in Residence at Mills College in Oakland California and at the historic artists’ retreat Villa Aurora in Los Angeles.

Concert program:

Sofia Gubaidulina:
String Quartet No. 2 (1987)

Johanna Magdalena Beyer:
String Quartet No. 2 (1936)
I Allegretto
II Largo
III Moderato
IV Allegro quasi presto

Julia Wolfe:
Four Marys (1991)

Joan Jeanrenaud:
Falling Water (2010)
I dive
II cascade
III riverfalls
IV waves goodbye

Kajia Saariaho:
Terra Memoria (2007)

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIgk6qpkk30
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au3wo1uLNGw

Sunday, Mar 16 2014 2:00 PM

The Nunnery
3016 - 25th Street
San Francisco

Matt Davignon and Eric Glick Rieman will present a set of duo improvisations that explore the potential of both electronic and electroacoustic instruments. And T.D. Skatchit will present a set of duo improvisations that feature the skatchbox but include additional instrumentation.

Matt Davignon is an experimental musician living in Oakland, California, best known for combining drum machine with a variety of electronic processing devices to create an expressive, organic-sounding synthesizer. His distinctive sound palette is informed not only by past experience with field recordings, household objects, prepared instruments and live sound collage, but also his love of psychedelic and space music. http://mattdavignon.bandcamp.com

Performing on a variety of instruments, including the prepared/extended Rhodes electric piano, as well as piano, melodica, celeste, organ, Waterphone, and toy piano, SF Bay Area composer/improviser Eric Glick Rieman performs improvised and previously structured music in several settings, both solo and in groups, He has performed with the Mills College Contemporary Performance Ensemble in Oakland, CA, USA since 1999, and received an MFA from Mills in Electronic Music and the Recording Media in 2001. Rieman writes for piano, Rhodes electric piano, and ensembles.

T.D. Skatchit (Tom Nunn and David Michalak) perform a duo set of improvised skatch music. The duo has produced a series four CDs over the last four years featuring trios made up of guest improvisers from the Bay Area, and has performed at various venues with several of the musicians they worked with. Their most recent endeavor was a large production, live surround sound performance of the title piece from their 4th CD, “Ear of the Strom,” and included eleven other improvisers. Unlike other performances, T.D. Skatchit will play as a duo (instead of trio) and will include lap steel guitar as well as other non-skatch instruments Nunn has made.

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Sunday, Mar 16 2014 7:30 PM

SIMM Series
Outsound Presents @ Musicians Union Hall
116 9th St @ Mission
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

7:30 Rent Romus' Life's Blood
Timothy Orr - drums/percussion, Markus Hunt - doublebass
Kim Cass - doublebass, Rent Romus - saxophones
8:30 Evelyn Davis & Christina Stanley
A piano and violin duo of powerful intensity

Evelyn Davis is a Bay Area-based improvisor, inside pianist/pianist, organist, vocalist, composer, and songwriter. After spending her life unto late teens as a classical pianist, she intensively studied jazz, orchestral composition, improvisation, and, for many years, has been an integral member of a variegated group of bands in genres ranging from highly-composed progressive rock to chamber pop to folk. Her primary focuses are psychoacoustic spectral phenomenon within dronal improvisation, the timbral properties of the inside piano, for which she creates assistive mallets, toys, and tools out of wood, metal, and rubber, and thorough exploration of the outer boundaries of electro-acoustic improvisation and songwriting. Currently she is vocalist and keyboardist for the genre-destroying band Cheer-Accident, bastions of the Chicago avant-garde scene since 1983, with whom she performed at the Rock in Opposition Festival in Carmeaux, France in September 2013. She is founder of and organist for the ensemble Drone Church, and intermittently she performs with large- scale Bay Area improvisation ensembles (such as OrcheSperry, Moechestra!), and with Bay Area notables such as Fred Frith, Phillip Greenlief, and Tzadik’s Aprille Tang, with whom she forms the electro-acoustic improvisation & neo-lieder duo VOZZT.

Christina Stanley is a bay area based violinist, composer, vocalist and artist. She is active as a performer, improviser, electronic musician and teacher. She has performed throughout Europe, the continental US and Cuba as a vocalist, violinist and electronic musician. She performed at SFEMF at SF MOMA and has premiered works by Roscoe Mitchell under conductor Petr Kotik. Her original painted graphic scores have been featured at the Outsound New Music Summit in San Francisco, Temple Ad Hoc in Los Angeles and Rock Paper Scissors Gallery in Oakland. She holds a BM from San Francisco State University, studied theater at HB Studio in New York City and holds an MFA in Music Performance and Literature from Mills College. She is passionate about working with living composers and composing new music.

Life's Blood "damn well rock their Jazz" says blogger disaster amnesiac while exploring the influences and inspirations that make the art of jazz and improvisation timeless. The ensemble pays tribute as well as brings to light, reinvents, deconstructs, and breaths life into the deeper realms of their collective body of memory. Originally created by Romus while on tour in Northern Europe in 1999, the group currently features bassists Kim Cass, Markus Hunt and drummer/percussionist Timothy Orr. They will be performing music from their latest recording Truth Teller as well as new originals for their upcoming album to be released in the Fall of 2014...
"...bold sound, unmistakeable sincerity and conviction." - Downbeat

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Sunday, Mar 16 2014 8:00 PM

Berkeley Arts
2133 University Avenue, between Shattuck & Oxford, walking distance from downtown Berkeley BART
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

8 pm
Jakob Pek - solo

Jakob Pek is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and poet originally from Vancouver, B.C. and raised in Las Vegas NV. His solo sets seamlessly interweave spoken word, song, and improvisation at the piano, guitar, and whatever other instruments are in the immediate vicinity. The total field of sound and silence is Jakob's palette, a palette he uses to reveal the musicality of the unmusical, the history of the present, and the mystery of the moment.

9 pm
Beth Schenck Quintet

Beth Schenck, alto saxophone
Cory Wright, tenor saxophone
Matt Wrobel, guitar
Lisa Mezzacappa, bass
Jordan Glenn, drums

Old and new friends play old and new music. Composer Beth Schenck writes poems of sound that critics have described as "frank and beautiful", with "solos full of artful logic". A recent transplant from Brooklyn, Beth assembles together some of the Bay Area's brightest improvisers for her first quintet show since arriving to the West Coast.

Monday, Mar 17 2014 7:30 PM

Mills College Littlefield Concert Hall
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

The Mills College Music Department and the Center for Contemporary Music present:

GEORGE LEWIS LECTURE
(Jean Macduff Vaux Composer-in-Residence)

Listening to Transgress: Collaborative Improvisation as Critical Pedagogy
George E. Lewis, Columbia University

Experimental music can both reflect and enact larger societal institutional and political conceptions. This talk explores relations among improvisation, concepts of phantasm and metaphor, and philosophical accounts of intentionality, social interaction, pedagogical listening, and ethics.

Monday, March 17, 2014
7:30 pm
Littlefield Concert Hall
Free and open to the public

Mills College
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland, CA 94613

http://musicnow.mills.edu

Monday, Mar 17 2014 8:00 PM

The Nunnery
3016 - 25th Street
San Francisco

The Nunnery presents "Guitar and Then Some" - an evening of improvised music featuring guitarist John Shiurba and RTD3.

8:00 John Shiurba plays a rare solo set and is then joined by guest David Michalak (lap steel) for a spirited duo piece.

9:00 RTD3 - Tom Nunn - inventions, Ron Heglin - voice, trombone, Doug Carroll - cello

John Shiurba - is a composer and guitarist whose musical pursuits include improvisation, art-rock, modern composition and noise. Shiurba has recorded and toured the U.S. and Europe as a member of the bands Eskimo, The Molecules and Spezza Rotto, as a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the SFSound Ensemble, and in various improv settings. Shiurba has composed works for his own Triplicate and 5x5 ensembles, for the SFSound Ensemble, and for various soloists. As a guitarist Shiurba has developed a unique and personalized approach to the guitar. Through the use of extended techniques and unusual preparations, he expands the traditional sound range of the instrument, producing stunning, often unrecognizable results.

David Michalak is a San Francisco based filmmaker and musician who plays lap steel guitar, skatchbox and percussion. He has released CDs with: T.D. Skatchit & Co., Ghost in the House, Reel Change and Doctor Bob.

RTD3 - demonstrates a collective intuition that guides the ongoing formation of composition effortlessly through a stream of acoustic images. Their focus lies in the innate potential of each moment to imply musical direction. The group’s strongest sensibility can be found in their phrasing and interactions, trading roles and functions as quickly as the music demands. RTD3 is well known in the Bay Area for its refined sense of ensemble and unique group "voice".

Audio samples on which musicians at this event appear:

Wednesday, Mar 19 2014 8:00 PM

Berkeley Arts
2133 University Avenue
Berkeley
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

8 pm
Luke Westbrook - guitar
Years of performance as a jazz musician, serious inquiry into early Western polyphonic music and an affinity for the raw textural potential of acoustic and electric stringed instruments form the primary elements of guitarist Luke Westbrook's unique breed of spontaneous composition.

9 pm
Whiskey Book
Ritwik Banerji, Cory Wright, Aaron Bennett - saxes
Ross Eustis, Theo Padouvas - trumpets
Kristina Dutton - violin
Teddy Rankin-Parker - cello
Bil Hager - bass
Daniel Pearce - drums

"The Whiskey Book" is a collection of compositions for improvisers. Having lived (something like) the Book of Job, Banerji writes the Whiskey Book to commemorate and alleviate hardship. Like Job, one must not lose faith. Inspirations for the Whiskey Book include: cellist Hamilton Berry, Vas Foremost Liquors, and the (continued) colonialist and racist abuse of the fictional Dr. Aziz.

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Thursday, Mar 20 2014 8:00 PM

Luggage Store New Music Series
Outsound co-Presents @ The Luggage Store Gallery
1007 Market St.
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

8pm: Gestaltish (Rachel Condry - clarinets, Gretchen Jude -vocals/mic, Jacob Pek - electric guitar/percussion, Jennifer Wilsey - percussion/piano)
9pm: Gosling (Sarah Elena Palmer and Danishta Rivero)

Gestaltish is a Bay Area quartet of improvisers who, when taken as a whole, may seem more than the sum of their parts. This dynamic group of musicians maintain a regular improvising practice together using game strategies and Deep Listening practices. Out of their continued work, they have developed their own language. Embracing tonality, rhythmic integrity or the absence of either, this free-improvising ensemble traipses deftly through sonic space and time. They will keep your ears...on their toes, as it were.

Gosling:
1. a young goose
2. a foolish, inexperienced person
3. The combined forces of vocalists, Danishta Rivero (Voicehandler,Blood Wedding, Aghora) and Sarah Elena Palmer (EFFT, Lutra Lutra)
Danishta: a musician/sound artist who specializes in the Hydrophonium (a water-based electro-acoustic percussion instrument), extended vocal techniques, and digital processing.
Sarah: a songwriter and a vocal improviser - tending towards the emotional and tonal - who also uses electronic processing to adjust the spacial/textural context of her sounds.

Friday, Mar 21 2014 8:00 PM

Turquoise Yantra Grotto
32 Turquoise Way
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Turquoise Yantra Grotto Presents:
Celebrate the Equinox out of Equal Temperament
An Evening With Larry Polanski, Giacomo Fiore and some unusual guitars
$10-15

Giacomo Fiore and Larry Polansky will perform solos and duos for guitar and other stringed instruments in various tuning systems. Works by Harrison, Tenney, Castilla-Avila, Nagorcka, and Polansky.

Larry Polansky (b. 1954) is a composer, theorist, teacher, writer, performer, programmer, editor and publisher. He lives in Santa Cruz, California, teaching at UC Santa Cruz. He is also the Emeritus Strauss Professor of Music at Dartmouth College, and co-director and co-founder of Frog Peak Music.
Giacomo Fiore is an Italian guitarist and musicologist who has performed across the United States, Brazil, Canada, and Europe, giving world and U.S. premieres of works by Larry Polansky, Ron Nagorcka, Lanier Sammons, Agustin Castilla-Avila, and many others. A recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Giacomo's research focuses on U.S. experimental music, tunings, and performance. He has published articles in TEMPO and the Journal of the Society for American Music, and is currently preparing his fourth solo recording for release thanks to a grant from New Music USA. Currently he lectures on a broad range of historical and practical topics at the San Francisco Conservatory, the University of San Francisco, California State University Monterey Bay, and UCSC.
“Each of the works on this program presented its own set of challenges, and Fiore was clearly up to all of them. He performed with a very unassuming style, always focused entirely on his instrument, always sensitive that each note sound (and resound) with just the right intonation [...] This was certainly one of the more well-informed programs in the Old First Concerts series; but the listening experience was far more than an academic exercise.”
——SF Classical Examiner

*******************************************************

The Turquoise Yantra Grotto is a house concert series for avant improvisers and invented instrumentalists with a focus on ethno-modernism and extended techniques. We hold a monthly event which is part concert, part art opening and part social club, near glen canyon in San Francisco.

Friday, Mar 21 2014 8:00 PM

Berkeley Arts
2133 University Avenue, between Shattuck & Oxford - Walking distance from downtown Berkeley BART
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

8 pm
Maeandros

Mavrothi Kontanis - oud, voice
Ahmad Yousefbeigi - percussion
Gregory Masaki Jenkins - clarinet

Maeandros performs a very unique mix of repertoire ranging from the folk music of Greece and former Greek lands in Asia Minor (Turkey), to urban "tavern" songs of the major Aegean cities of Constantinople (Istanbul), Smyrna (Izmir), Athens, and Thessaloniki, along with classical music of the Ottoman court, all from the early 20th century or earlier.

Friday, Mar 21 2014 8:00 PM

Jupiter
2181 Shattuck Ave.
Berkeley
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

John Ettinger Band
John Ettinger - violin
Jon Preuss - guitar
Jason Hoopes - bass
Jan Jackson - drums

8pm - 11pm

Saturday, Mar 22 2014 2:00 PM

Center for New Music
55 Taylor St
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Film@C4NM: Fabricating Tom Ze + Brass Unbound

From the Art Ensemble to Tom Ze, from Ascension to Zappa: FILM@C4NM presents some of the world's most compelling music documentaries and performance films. Screening astonishing sounds from around the planet, this film series is expressly designed to open music lovers' eyes and ears even further.

All shows are 2pm weekend matinees
Refreshments and special filmmaker and artists in-person
Admission: $10 General / $7 Members

This week: Musical Culture Gets Funky

FABRICATING TOM ZE
(2007 89 minutes Decios Matos, Jr.)
Filmed during a concert tour, this lively portrait charts the freewheeling musical world of Tom Zé, for whom a guitar and a vacuum cleaner have the same melodic potential. David Byrne, Arto Lindsay, and others credit Zé with revitalizing Tropicalia; whether you agree or no, Zé's samba mash-up of "Smoke on the Water" and "Hey Jude" will turn your head around. With musical legends Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.
about the filmmaker

BRASS UNBOUND
(1993 106 minutes Johan van der Keuken)
When the colonial powers finally retreated from Asia and Africa, they left behind their military band instruments. This astonishing and amusing film shows how four very different post-colonial societies (in Nepal, Suriname, Indonesia, and Ghana) reshaped these imperialistic instruments to herald their own musical cultures. Colonel Bogey never sounded so funky.
about the filmmaker

Saturday, Mar 22 2014 8:00 PM

Mills College Littlefield Concert Hall
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland, CA 94613

The Mills College Music Department and the Center for Contemporary Music present Mills Music Now 2013-2014:

GEORGE LEWIS
(Jean Macduff Vaux Composer-in-Residence)

Saturday, March 22, 2014
8:00 PM
Littlefield Concert Hall
http://musicnow.mills.edu

Free to Mills students, faculty, and staff
Tickets:
$15 General Admission
$10 seniors, Mills Alums, and non-Mills students
Buy tickets online at
http://www.boxofficetickets.com

Mills College
Littlefield Concert Hall
5000 MacArthur Blvd.
Oakland, CA

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Program:

New Work (2014)
for an ensemble of Mills musicians

Artificial Life (2007)
mixed instrumental ensemble

Improvisation
George Lewis, trombone
Roscoe Mitchell, saxophone
William Winant, percussion

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George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. The recipient of a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, a 1999 Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2011 United States Artists Walker Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work in electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, and notated and improvisative forms is documented on more than 140 recordings. His work has been presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Talea Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Wet Ink, Ensemble Erik Satie, Eco Ensemble, and others, with commissions from American Composers Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Harvestworks, Ensemble Either/Or, Orkestra Futura, Turning Point Ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, IRCAM, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, and others. Lewis has served as Ernest Bloch Visiting Professor of Music, University of California, Berkeley; Paul Fromm Composer in Residence, American Academy in Rome; Resident Scholar, Center for Disciplinary Innovation, University of Chicago; and CAC Fitt Artist In Residence, Brown University. Lewis received the 2012 SEAMUS Award from the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, and his book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award. Lewis is the co-editor of the forthcoming two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, and is composing Afterword, an opera commissioned by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, to be premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in Fall 2015.

Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0S4DUC2zRA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJJHOcxC1M0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtTosieICIQ

Sunday, Mar 23 2014 4:00 PM

Center for New Music
55 Taylor St
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

David Hatt presents two sets of solo piano music of the 20th and 21st centuries. The program includes the First Sonata of Charles E. Ives, academic works by Gregory Kosteck and Homer Keller, creative oddities by Barney Childs, Arthur Farwell and Jim Fox, and other pieces, including Mr. Hatt’s own The Continuous Life.

Biography

David Hatt received the M.A. Degree in Music in 1978 from U.C. Riverside, with a specialty in keyboard performance. His primary teachers of organ and harpsichord were Raymond Boese at the University of Redlands and Anthony Newman at U.C. San Diego. He also studied composition with renowned polymath Barney Childs and carillon with Lowell Smith.

In 2004 he was asked to present the opening concert of the 47th Conference of the College Music Society, held in San Francisco. This event featured the music of CMS composers, and it was the first time in the history of the Society that the invited guest performed every piece that was submitted by the review committee. He is also a frequent performer at conventions of the Society of Composers, Inc. A specialist in new music from an early age, he performed Satie’s Vexations for piano in an unassisted version in 1976. His Master’s Recital of the same year was over 5 hours long and consisted entirely of 20th-Century music for five different keyboard instruments.

Currently he is the Assistant Cathedral Organist at St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco, a position he has held since 1997. His performances of the music of Max Reger on the Cathedral’s Ruffatti are featured on a DVD/CD collection, “Streets and Sounds of San Francisco”, produced by Michael Schnurr. He has appeared several times with the San Francisco Symphony, including performing the organ parts of Liszt’s “Dante” Symphony and Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony. He is also featured in an experimental online opera, “I, Norton”, by Gino Robair, about a famous SF historical character.

Dave’s original compositions have been published by Wayne Leupold Editions, Amalgamate Sound and Darcey Press. His arrangement of David N. Johnson’s Trumpet Tune in B-flat was included in a new edition of Johnson’s works by Augsburg Fortress Publishing.

In the Fall of 2008, under the guise of the Bay Area Reger Festival, he sponsored the Juilliard alumnus Isabelle Demers in her first trip to the West Coast. This series of unique concerts featured Dave’s performance of the complete Op. 63 Monologues, a prodigious and challenging event for organist and audience alike.

Sunday, Mar 23 2014 8:30 PM

Duende
468 19th Street
Oakland
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

John Schott Band

John Schott - guitar
Jessica Jones - sax
Jason Hoopes - bass
Vijay Anderson - drums

Audio samples on which musicians at this event appear:

Monday, Mar 24 2014 8:00 PM

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission St @3rd
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Anton Webern’s 1934 masterwork Concerto for Nine Instruments is juxtaposed with the premiere of a commissioned inter-media work by Polish composer Jaroslaw Kapuscinski entitled Pointing Twice, with Korean guest choreographer Young-Doo Jung. Also Brian Ferneyhough’s La Chute D’Icare, and In Memoriam Jon Higgins by Alvin Lucier. Pre-concert talk @ 7:15pm

Tuesday, Mar 25 2014 7:30 PM

Tom's Place
3111 Deakin Street
Berkeley
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Tatsuya Nakatani (gongs) and Phillip Greenlief (sax)

Tatsuya Nakatani's approach to music is visceral, non-linear and intuitively primitive, expressing an unusually strong spirit while avoiding any categorization. He creates sound via both traditional and extended percussion techniques, utilizing drums, bowed gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, metal objects and bells, as well as various sticks, kitchen tools and homemade bows, all of which manifest in an intense and organic music that represents a very personal sonic world. His approach is steeped in the sensibilities of free improvisation, experimental music, jazz, rock, and noise, and yet retains the sense of space and quiet beauty found in traditional Japanese folk music. His percussion instruments can imitate the sounds of a trumpet, a stringed instrument or an electronic device to the extent that it becomes difficult to recognize the source of the sound. He has devoted himself to a musical aesthetic where rhythm gives way to pulse, often in a way that is not always audible or visible, in currents that incorporate silence and texture.

Check out his stunning sound clips here:
http://hhproduction.org/Solo%20Sounds%20Clips.html

More information at his web site:
http://hhproduction.org/TATSUYA_NAKATANI_WORKS.html

Audio samples on which musicians at this event appear:

Wednesday, Mar 26 2014 6:30 PM

Grace Cathedral
1100 California St, San Francisco, CA 94108

Benefit Concert for the Homeless Children's Network
with Evelyn Davis as well as The Equity and Social Justice Quartet Performs at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral

MORE INFORMATION
http://www.markushunt.com/press-release.html
ADVANCE TICKETS $25
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/565237

6:30 PM Evelyn Davis - solo piano
7:30 PM The Equity and Social Justice Quartet
Markus Hunt - bass, David Boyce - tenor saxophone, Timothy Orr - drums
special guest filling in for Henry Hung, Rent Romus - alto saxophone



San Francisco, Calif., February 12, 2014; The Equity and Social Justice Quartet, a new jazz group formed by Bay Area bassist and educator Markus Hunt, will perform their debut concert at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco on Wednesday, March 26, at 6:30 p.m. This “Rush Hour Recital” at Grace is a benefit for the Homeless Children’s Network. Tickets are $25, and are available through Brown Paper Tickets. All proceeds from this event will go the Homeless Children's Network.


The benefit marks the debut of the Equity and Social Justice Quartet. The jazz ensemble features Markus Hunt on bass; David Boyce on saxophone, Henry Hung on trumpet, and Timothy Orr on drums. Also appearing on the bill is pianist Evelyn Davis and saxophonist Rent Romus.

"The Equity and Social Justice Quartet is deeply personal,” says Hunt. “Most of my life, I have worked in schools, helping young people find their voice. As I considered how this project could be an extension of that work, I realized that I was afforded a unique opportunity—the marriage of art and empathy. As part of the series by the same name, it is an honor to present our first live show at Grace Cathedral.”

An educator at the Cathedral School for Boys, Markus Hunt brought together some of the Bay Area’s finest musicians in 2013 to record eight original compositions on The Whisper of Flowers—including a spontaneous improvisation, a bass/drum duet, solo bass, and a three-part suite, through which the group swings, crashes, and grooves through labyrinths of sound, mixing rhythm and color. The quartet creates a rich and textured aural experience, with the influences of Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus coming through in Hunt’s loosely-crafted compositions.

The Whisper of Flowers is Hunt's first recording as a leader. The title of the album was taken from a quote from bassist William Parker: “It is not about jazz, it is about sound as revealed through the mysteries of life. About those who have said yes to the whisper of a flower and the shout of a blue hurricane.”

About Homeless Children's Network
Since 1992, the Homeless Children's Network has been providing comprehensive mental health services, case management, early childhood mental health consultation, education, aftercare, and family support services to over 2,000 homeless children, youth, parents, and providers. On behalf of a 35-member collaborative, HCN provides a forum for networking, education, mental health referrals, and shared resources for homeless service providers.

The Quartet Plays Selections from 2014 Edgetone Records Debut,
The Whisper of Flowers, to be Released April 22

Audio samples on which musicians at this event appear:

Wednesday, Mar 26 2014 8:00 PM

Berkeley Arts
2133 University Avenue
Berkeley
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Tatsuya Nakatani Gong Orchestra

Matt Chandler
Kevin Corcoran
Nava Dunkelman
Michael Elrod
Jordan Glenn
Jacob Felix Heule
Robert Lopez
Anup Pradhan
Danishta Rivero
Karen Stackpole
Marshall Trammell

Audio samples on which musicians at this event appear:

Thursday, Mar 27 2014 8:00 PM

Luggage Store New Music Series
Outsound co-Presents @ The Luggage Store Gallery
1007 Market St.
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

8:00 Quattuor Elephantis
Brett Carson, Mateo Lugo, Robert Lopez, Scott Siler
9:00 Talk More
Andrew Weathers, Shanna Sordahl, Aaron Oppenheim

Saturday, Mar 29 2014 8:00 PM

Trinity Chapel
2320 Dana St., Berkeley
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Nanette McGuinness, soprano, Dale Tsang, piano, and Adaiha MacAdam-Somer (the Jewish Music & Poetry Project) will perform world premieres of works by Elena Ruehr (Winter Solstice Songs) and David Garner (Such Innocent Words, with texts by Yala Korwin), two new songs to texts by Rose Auslaender, a new arrangement by Ruth Lomon, and works by Hungarian and Czech composers

The program will start with a brief composer/ poet talk/ Q&A

Advance ticket sales available online only at http://wintersolsticesongs.bpt.me.

Saturday, Mar 29 2014 10:00 PM

Studio Grand
3234 Grand Ave,
Oakland
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Ton Trio II with Aram Shelton, alto saxophone; Scott Brown, bass; Alex Vittum, drums. An avant/modern jazz trio focused on the group dynamic utilizing folksy melodies and wide open structures. The written parts serve as entry points for spacious improvisations, with all three members playing almost continuously, keeping the voices of melody, harmony and rhythm on an even level. Shelton’s angular but forward moving lines are supported by Brown’s earthy bass and Vittum’s focused rhythms. The Oakland based Ton Trio II was formed by Shelton in late 2012 as the newest vehicle for his small ensemble avant jazz writing, heard before in groups including Arrive (482 Music and CleanFeed) with Jason Adasiewicz, Jason Roebke and Tim Daisy; Cylinder (CleanFeed) with Darren Johnston, Lisa Mezzacappa and Kjell Nordeson; and the Fast Citizens (Delmark) with Fred Lonberg-Holm, Josh Berman, Keefe Jackson, and Frank Rosaly. Ton Trio II has developed a body of work in the past year through shows in Oakland hosted by the Oakland Freedom Jazz Society at the Layover and Duende.

A recent midwestern transplant to Oakland, originally from Chicago, Scott Brown studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with Robert Hurst, Geri Allen, Donald Walden, and Marianne Hayden, and composition Andrew Mead & Andrew Bishop. He crossed paths with Jon Irabagon and Jameson Ross at the Steans Institute. He currently performs throughout the bay area with Astronauts Etc, the Lawlands, and Idea the Artist.

Alex Vittum is a percussionist and composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area who combines the disciplines of percussion, electronic music and instrument building. He is a member of several groups including Stratic, For Now, Ton Trio II, and performs solo electro-acoustic works as Prism. Alex has collaborated with a diverse group of musicians, composers and choreographers including Roswell Rudd, Kitty Brazleton, Ben Goldberg, Daniel Carter, Stuart Dempster, and Gina Gibney Dance. He has a BA from Bennington College, an MFA from Mills College and has studied percussion with Milford Graves and William Winant. For more information, please visit his site www.alexvittum.com.

Website: www.aramshelton.com/music/ton-trio-ii/
Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJfB4fQTYXE&feature=youtu.be
Audio: soundcloud.com/aramshelton/orange-poppies

$8-12 Suggested Donation

Sunday, Mar 30 2014 2:00 PM

Center for New Music
55 Taylor St
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

film@C4NM: On the Edge: Improvisation

From the Art Ensemble to Tom Ze, from Ascension to Zappa: FILM@C4NM presents some of the world's most compelling music documentaries and performance films. Screening astonishing sounds from around the planet, this film series is expressly designed to open music lovers' eyes and ears even further.

All shows are 2pm weekend matinees
Refreshments and special filmmaker and artists in-person
Admission: $10 General / $7 Members

This week: On The Edge: Improvisation

ON THE EDGE: IMPROVISATION
(1992 Jeremy Marre, Derek Bailey)
A legendary miniseries about improvisational music in all of its forms. Written by guitarist Derek Bailey and based on his seminal book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, the program includes everything from traditional Korean music to liturgical pipe organ performance to Jerry Garcia to free jazz. Fascinating films - and required viewing for anyone interested in musical invention.
about the filmmaker

Center for New Music
55 Taylor St
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

Robert Dick will bring his array of flutes, from the piccolo to the giant F bass for his first San Francisco solo concert in over a decade. Known worldwide for his rampantly inventive approach and mastery of extended techniques such as multiphonics and circular breathing, Robert’s performances have been compared to the experience of hearing a full orchestra.

The program will include his invention, the Glissando Headjoint®, the whammy bar for the flute. Using his multiple mic system, Robert creates a vividly detailed and tactile sound plane.

Robert will play both composed and improvised music and the concert will have several West Coast premieres, including the performance of his art/music hybrid “Babylonish Gabble.”

When we started to open our ears and minds in the 60s, Robert was there. It's light years later, and he’s continuously accelerated throughout. Experience the dimensions of his passionate journey.

Thursday, Apr 3 2014 8:00 PM

Luggage Store New Music Series
Outsound co-Presents @ The Luggage Store Gallery
1007 Market St.
SF
Click for Venue page on bayimproviser

8pm: MoreGuitar - Michael Knowlton/David Michalak
9pm: Thomas Carnacki

Michael Knowlton is a Stinson Beach based visual artist and musician who loves to surf when not playing the guitar or painting. He feels fortunate to have played with two generations of Bay Area experimental musicians and instrument builders and loves the interaction and dialogue that happens in the moment. His CD releases include: Swarm Warnings, Moanin Parade, and Sideshow Seance. Knowlton's paintings have been widely exhibited and collectors include Tom Waits, Dennis Hopper, Nicolas Cage, and Danielle Steele.

David Michalak is a San Francisco based filmmaker and musician who has never surfed and only recently has admitted to being a guitar player. He's made over 50 films, some of which have been shown at the SF International Film Festival, Cannes, The Everson Art Museum and other less noted venues. He has released CDs with: T.D. Skatchit & Co., Ghost in the House, Reel Change and Doctor Bob. His performances are characterized by shimmering passages, abstract snapshots and haunting representations of visual elements.

Thomas Carnacki is a purloined moniker attached to the recording and performing activities of Berkeley-based Gregory Scharpen, who in turn emerges from the twin factory-farms of theatrical sound design and several tours of duty with the oblique-concrete outfit irr. app. (ext.). Thomas Carnacki has performed on both coasts of the continent, and has convinced a sizable number of luminaries to shed their dignity and participate in the proceedings. The core performing outfit generally includes Jesse Burson, James Kaiser, and Gregory Hagan. Carnacki performances have taken place in festivals such as Project Soundwave and the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and as part of such organisms as the Illuminated Corridor and Neighborhood Public Radio. https://www.facebook.com/thomascarnacki

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