Ivy Room
860 San Pablo Ave Albany
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9pm doors
9:30pm Ushi-matsuri Ritual marking the day the International Labour Organization was founded
9:35pm Life's Blood Ensemble

FREE | donations wildly appreciated

Richmond-based saxophonist/composer Rent Romus commences a three-month mini-residency featuring his Life's Blood Ensemble recreating their 2017 recording Rising Colossus in its entirety. The line-up for this show includes:

Rent Romus, reeds
Timothy Orr, drums/percussion
Safa Shokrai, double bass
Max Judelson, double bass
Heikki Koskinen, e-trumpet/recorder
Joshua Marshall, tenor saxophone
Mark Clifford, vibraphone

About Life's Blood Ensemble
Created in 1999 by saxophonist Rent Romus while on tour in northern Europe, LBE pays tribute as well as brings to light, reinvents, deconstructs, and breathes life into the deeper realms of their collective body of memory. Performing original music, as well as contemporary local and international composers, they explore the influences and inspirations that make the art of jazz and improvisation timeless. Their latest album Rising Colossus (2017) "offers an incisive and often exhilarating glimpse at a scene that Romus has played an essential role in shaping. Life's Blood Ensemble dives headlong into a disparate array of compositions, opening and closing the album with very different works inspired by epic tales..." (Andrew Gilbert SF Chron)

About Rent Romus
Rent 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 compositional contemporary ensemble, and works with pianist Thollem McDonas in the Bloom Project as well as the collective improvisation group The Ruminations.

He has recorded over 40 albums exploring improvisation and composition in a wide variety of musical settings both as a leader and sideman which have included Chico Freeman, John Tchicai, Vinny Golia, Teppo Hauta-aho, Thollem McDonas, Stefan Pasborg, James Zitro, Heikki Koskinen, Marcos Fernandez, and Ernesto Diaz-Infante to name a few. He is the founder of Edgetone Records with over 30 years of independent music production, and performance experience as well as the founder and Executive Director of Outsound Presents under which curates the bi-weekly music series known as SIMM at the Musicians Union Hall, the weekly Luggage Store Gallery Creative Music Series, as well as annual Outsound New Music Summit, the Bay Area's creative music festival held every summer in San Francisco.

http://www.romus.net/
https://rentromus.bandcamp.com/
https://edgetonerecords.bandcamp.com/album/rising-colossus

Cost: $FREE donations wildly accepted

Audio samples in which musicians at this event play:

Videos featuring musicians playing at this event