SIMM Series @ The Musicians Union Hall
116 9th St @ Mission SF
Click for Venue page

7:30pm Bleeding Vector
Lorin Benedict - voice, Eric Vogler - guitar
8:30pm Pek/Dunkelman/Romus
Jakob Pek - guitar, preparations, percussion
Nava Dunkelman - percussion
Rent Romus - saxophones

Lorin Benedict is an improvising vocalist (scat singer, essentially) living in Oakland. He attempts to introduce more structurally involved elements into the field of vocal improvisation. Most of his work in this area is centered loosely in the jazz idiom. Recently, Lorin has co-led small groups (duos, trios) in which the roles of the musicians are somewhat mutable even in contexts where highly structured forms are being played. Examples include Bleeding Vector with Berkeley guitarist Eric Vogler, and another duo project with east bay saxophonist Kasey Knudsen. Together, these three musicians jointly lead the trio project, The Holly Martins. He has also co-led another duo project with Oakland-based drummer Sam Ospovat. Lorin joined the fold of musicians rather late in life, at the age of 31, after many years of listening to recordings and live performances, many of which involved members of his immediate family (all of whom are/were orchestral musicians in the western classical tradition).

Bleeding Vector w/Eric Vogler guitar, Lorin Benedict voice-a-phone from mxxx palmer on Vimeo.

Jakob Pek is a musician and artist based in Oakland, CA. He creates a contemporary world music for the new century. Avant garde, experimental, and improvisational in nature, Jakob's music interweaves chaos with symmetry, harmonizing refined expressions of familiar sonic worlds with journeys into uncharted domains of abstraction and discovery. A distinctive soloist, Jakob is equally comfortable joining others as he is guiding the stream on his own. He performs regularly as half DunkelpeK, a duo with like-minded percussionist Nava Dunkelman. Jakob has performed with many pioneers of contemporary improvisation, such as Fred Frith, David Behrman, Arrington de Dionyso, Theresa Wong, Rent Romus, Chris Brown, and Sandy Ewen. Some of Jakob's notable performances have included performances at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Musica Medicina Festival in Pisaq, Peru, and the Haight Ashbury Street Fair in San Francisco.
https://www.jakobpek.com

Nava Dunkelman is a Bay Area based percussionist and improviser. Born in Tokyo, Japan and raised in a multi-cultural environment by an American father and Indonesian mother, her musical interests span the globe from Japanese taiko to Indonesian gamelan to American marching band, and from classical to contemporary to the avant-garde. Since graduating with a degree in music performance in 2013, she has performed and collaborated with William Winant, Fred Frith, John Zorn, Ikue Mori, George Lewis and many others. She has performed classical and contemporary pieces with the William Winant Percussion Group, inkBoat, The Luna Ensemble, San Francisco Girls Chorus, among others. She also formed the improvisational trio Dapplegray, as well as electro-percussion experimental noise duo IMA, and improvisational duo DunkelpeK. Nava enjoys discovering her own musical language by exploring experimental approaches to communication, progression and space.
https://www.navadunkelman.com/

Rent Romus is a saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist, composer, bandleader, music producer, and community leader hailed by Downbeat as having "...a bold sound, unmistakable sincerity and conviction". A third generation Finnish American born in the great north of upper Michigan and growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Romus' work on the saxophone has been dubbed “ferocious” by the San Francisco Weekly and “central to the creative music world of the West Coast” by writer jazz critic Frank Rubolino. From his very beginnings as a student of jazz while being exposed to the twilight tutelage of Stan Getz he found himself drawn to the outer realms of Sun Ra and Albert Ayler, as well as Arthur Blythe, Derek Bailey and Merzbow. He leads the Lords of Outland a free improvisation unit since 1994, the Life’s Blood Ensemble a compostional contemporary ensemble, and works with pianist Thollem McDonas in the Bloom Project as well as the collective improvisation group The Ruminations.
http://www.romus.net

Cost: $10-$20 sliding scale

Audio samples in which musicians at this event play:

Videos featuring musicians playing at this event