Amirtha Kidambi's Elder Ones & Dunkelman/Fluke-Mogul/Nishi-Smith
OAKLAND FREEDOM JAZZ SOCIETY PRESENTS....
Amirtha Kidambi's Elder Ones
Sometimes the eye of a storm can draw upon the chaos around it, taking on its energy and consolidating it for use. Something like that is going on in Elder Ones, the quartet led by the vocalist and harmonium player Amirtha Kidambi. She creates drones on the harmonium — an old, air-powered keyboard — and coaxes her bandmates into ripping them apart. Then her voice funnels that energy out in a scorching beam. In its best moments, it’s like a mix of a Cuban sonero’s citrusy cry and a riot grrrl yowl. - New York Times, Giovanni Russonello
The forthcoming release From Untruth builds upon the bedrock foundation of Kidambi's previous compositional and conceptual work with Elder Ones, while forging uncharted territory. After a journey into wordless abstraction on Holy Science, Kidambi felt the urgency of the political moment required a direct and verbal call to action. The lyric fragments in "Eat the Rich", "Decolonize the Mind", "Dance of the Subaltern" and "From Untruth" critique power structures of capitalism, racism, colonialism and fascism, distilling heavy post-colonial theory into concentrated visceral battle cries. The instrumentation adds a layer of technology as a metaphor for modernity, with Kidambi on analog synthesizer and Max Jaffe's drumming talents extended to electronic Sensory Percussion. The frenzied improvising of Matt Nelson on soprano sax and gravity of Nick Dunston on bass, anchor the music in the tradition of free jazz, while it pushes into new futurist realms. The aesthetic seamlessly reels from modal meditation, atonal expressionism, free improvisation and melodic invention, to unabashed bursts of punk rock energy. This is Elder Ones at an unadulterated breaking point; on the edge of a knife that cuts.
Amirtha Kidambi "takes a holistic approach to singing, which can mean treating every element as unfixed: Words can be opened up, rendered nonspecific. Melody can be repeated and frozen and stuck in place. Markings of rhythm can become utterly abstract, freed from cadence." (New York Times).
Kidambi is the composer and bandleader of her quartet Elder Ones, with Matt Nelson, Max Jaffe and Nick Dunston and the leader of her vocal quartet Lines of Light, featuring Anaïs Maviel, Emilie Lesbros and Jean-Carla Rodea. Kidambi is also a regular collaborator of Lea Bertucci, in a voice and analog electronics duo, is a member of guitarist Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl, featured in various projects with composer and alto saxophonist Darius Jones, a longtime contributor of Charlie Looker’s early music inspired dark folk band Seaven Teares and a soloist in Pat Spadine's analog percussion and light ensemble Ashcan Orchestra. She has collaborated and performed with New York luminaries in the experimental and creative music community including Tyshawn Sorey, Matana Roberts, Ingrid Laubrock, Maria Grand, Brandon Lopez, Daniel Carter, Sam Newsome, Trevor Dunn, Ava Mendoza, Matteo Liberatore and veteran improviser William Parker.
Her debut as a bandleader was met with critical acclaim. As Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times, “the aggressive and sublime first album by the band Elder Ones, Holy Science, is a kind of gauge for how strong and flexible the scene of young musicians in New York’s improvised and experimental music world can be. At the center of it are drones and phonemes. The group’s leader, the composer and singer Amirtha Kidambi, holds forth behind a harmonium, the small keyboard instrument with hand-pumped bellows; it’s commonly used in bhajan, the Indian devotional-singing tradition that was central to her musical experience while growing up in a South Indian family.” Kidambi formally trained in classical music, singing works by experimental composers including Robert Ashley and Luigi Nono, but the pull of free jazz and Alice Coltrane drew her toward a different path. The influence of both Alice and John Coltrane is especially apparent, as is her work with composer and saxophonist Darius Jones, and her study of Carnatic music. The group’s follow-up album From Untruth will be released in March 2019, on Northern Spy Records.
As a performer and improviser, Kidambi has premiered works by pioneering composers including AACM founder and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams’, premiering his Dialogue Social Roulette in 2013, Robert Ashley’s CRASH at the Whitney Biennial in 2013, Darius Jones’ The Oversoul Manual at Carnegie Hall in 2014, electronic composer Ben Vida’s work Slipping Control for voice and electronics with Tyondai Braxton at the Borderline Festival in Athens, Greece in 2014 and William Parker’s Soul of Light in 2017. Recent recordings include William Parker’s Voices Fall From the Sky (2018), the debut recording of Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl (2018) and Ingrid Laubrock’s Contemporary Chaos Practices (2018). Kidambi has toured nationally and internationally including performances at Carnegie Hall, Newport Jazz Festival, Berlin Jazzfest, Jazz Jantar in Poland and Music Unlimited in Austria. She was a Summer 2018 Artist-in-Residence at Bucareli 69 in Mexico City, where she performed with several local artists including Mexico’s premiere free improvisation collective Generacion Espontanea. Kidambi has been commissioned by the Jerome Foundation, receiving the Emerging Artist Commission in 2014 and Artist-in-Residence in 2018, through Roulette in Brooklyn. She was also a resident artist at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in New York State, where Elder Ones recorded Holy Science.
Amirtha earned an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University, an M.M. in Voice and Musicology at CUNY Brooklyn College and a B..A. in Voice from Loyola Marymount University. She currently serves on the faculty for the New School, teaching music history courses and heading a large scale curriculum development project. She has also served on the faculty at Brooklyn College.
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Dunkelman/Fluke-Mogul/Nishi-Smith Trio
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. Nava studied percussion under Eugene Novotney at Humboldt State University before attending Mills College, where she graduated with a degree in music performance in 2013 and studied with William Winant, Fred Frith, Maggi Payne, Zeena Parkins, and David Bernstein.
She has performed and collaborated with William Winant, Fred Frith, John Zorn, Ikue Mori, George Lewis, Matmos and many others. She has performed classical and contemporary pieces with the William Winant Percussion Group, Joan Jeanrenaud, San Francisco Girls Chorus, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and others.
She also formed 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.
gabby fluke-mogul is an improvising violinist, composer, & educator living in Oakland, CA. they speak through languages of the jazz continuum, avant-garde, & folk traditions, deeply embodying the violin in their solo & ensemble playing. Through composing/performing, gfm hopes to create space for individual & collective intersectional process, intimacy, & vulnerability. they are interested in the sensual nature of sound—how queer desire & eroticism are embodied & translated within the political & poetic contexts of improvisation.
gabby holds a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA where they studied Improvised Music & Composition with Marty Ehrlich & Dan Warner and a MFA in Music Performance and Literature with Improvisation Specialization from Mills College in Oakland, CA where they worked with Pauline Oliveros, Jennifer Wilsey, Zeena Parkins, India Cooke, Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, Kala Ramnath, W.A. Mathieu, & Kara Davis. gabby holds a Deep Listening certificate from Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening Institute.
Current collaborators include:
Nava Dunkelman,
Kanoko Nishi-Smith, Lisa Mezzacappa, Jacob Felix Heule, Jordan Glenn, Kyle Bruckmann, Fred Frith, Tom Weeks, & Bruce Ackley.
Kanoko Nishi-Smith is an artist currently based in SF/Bay Area. Despite her early training in classical piano performance and past involvement in Contemporary/New music performances, her most recent interest has primarily been in improvisational music making, both in a solo context and in collaborations with other artists. She has been exploring both on the piano, as well as on her second instrument, koto (13, or 17-string Japanese zither), various extended techniques, widening the range of vocabularies on each instrument and enabling them to adapt to different situations, both musical, and interdisciplinary.
9PM SHOW
$5-15 Suggested Donation