OFJS: Finkbeiner/Allen/Levin + Trouble Ensemble
OFJS PRESENTS....
Finkbeiner/Allen/Levin
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John Finkbeiner, guitar
Josh Allen, sax
Aaron Levin, drums
We play what we want and then hope you like it.
The DEBUT GIG for this power trio of veteran Bay Area improvisers who continue to explore and expand their unique language which encompasses elements of free improv, energy music, the avant-garde, rock, hardcore, but nothing that starts with j. California Maximalism by the 3 founders of the genre.
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Trouble Ensemble
Rent Romus,
Joshua Marshall, Maureen Spranza saxophones
Jakob Pek, guitar
Tim DeCillis, vibraphone
Andrew Jamieson, keyboard
Chris Lauf, drums
Ernest Larkins, voice
Directed by composer, arranger and pianist
Andrew Barnes Jamieson, Trouble Ensemble performs music in dialogue with African American spiritual music. Especially black spirituals themselves. These are not simply presentations of spirituals. Especially because Jamieson and some other ensemble members with mostly European ancestry must not claim this music or its history as their own. Instead, the music must Trouble them. Perhaps, it offers a vision for dialogue. And community. And society.
As some of the first African American music, spirituals illuminate the spiritual force that troubles the waters of injustice and oppression using the power of African and African American music and spirituality. Originally songs of black American slaves, they are rooted in song, dance and drumming of West Africa, the experience of oppression of an uprooted people, and the teachings of a transformative faith. They troubled the dominant narratives, and their message and tradition continue to trouble unjust systems today. Composers and experimenters (like Sun Ra, Charles Ives and Pauline Oliveros) Troubled the musical establishment and its conventions as they envisioned radical new ways of making and listening to sound. Their traditions are a separate musical “voice” from African American spirituality and the two voices cannot merge into one. Instead, they must converse. Listen to one another. Learn from one another. Imagine a new way of being. Discover harmony. Enjoy dissonance. Each with our own distinct voices, we create, listen to, revere and question, the melody, rhythm and text derived from spirituals, and other songs they inspired, we revel in our own ways of enjoying, discovering and making: Trouble.
Their first album In the Water came out on Edgetone Records in June 2018 with poet Marvin K White: https://edgetonerecords.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-water
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMsgh6JRjuI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fopSGLUFX7Q
9PM
$5-15 SUGGESTED DONATION
Videos featuring musicians playing at this event
A montage of the free music group the Lords of Outland from their live presented as part of The Tenderloin Museum’s Sounds of the Tenderloin live music series at the Tenderloin National Forest in San Francisco July of 2022
Featuring Rent Romus on alto/soprano saxophones, Ray Schaeffer on bass, Anthony Flores on drums, and Philip Everett on