Bird & Beckett Books and Records
653 Chenery St. SF
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REOTREO has its roots in the three and a half decades-long association of percussionist Robinson and reed player Ochs, who have collaborated in free and structured improvisation in a duo format privately and publicly since the early 1990s, when they first began working together in saxophonist Glenn Spearman’s Double Trio. The Double Trio released three lps between 1993 and 1996. In 1994, the two colleagues joined with bassist Lisle Ellis in the trio What We Live, which released seven lps between 1994 and 2002. In 1997, Robinson joined with Ochs’ long-standing (since 1977) band, ROVA Saxophone Quartet to record their revivication of John Coltrane’s Ascension. From 2000 to 2010, Ochs and Robinson joined with Scott Amendola in the Larry Ochs Sax and Drumming Core, and their collaboration in various settings and as a duo has been continuous to this day, with releases by the Larry Ochs – Don Robinson Duo coming out in 2014 and 2021.

Enter Karl Evangelista, who performed with the duo for the first time in July 2022 to electrifying effect — producing the new aggregation, REOTREO. Evangelista is a ferocious young improvising guitarist whose own projects have been legion since emerging from the MFA program in improvised music at Mills College in 2009 with his band Grex. Apura, his ongoing current project, began in 2008 with research on emigre musicians in England coming from the South African jazz group The Blue Notes and diversifying into the London-based Brotherhood of Breath. Evangelista’s collaboration with Blue Notes/Brotherhood drummer Louis Moholo Moholo was documented in the October 2018 recordings made in London and released as Apura (Astral Spirits, 2020), with saxophonist Trevor Watts and keyboard player Alexander Hawkins. The Apura project later spawned a May 2023 Bay Area recording session with drummer Andrew Cyrille and many giants of the Bay Area improvising avant garde including Francis Wong, Lisa Mezzacappa and Rei Scampavia, documented on the album Ngoyon (Astral Spirits, 2023) and, most recently, the mid-November 2023 Bird & Beckett engagement with saxophonist Trevor Watts, percussionist Jamie Harris and bassist Lisa Mezzacappa.

REOTREO met guest bassist Kazuto Sato during the trio’s June 2023 engagement at the Temescal Art Center, and invited him to join them for their Palo Alto engagement in late October. Stoked by that experience, the augmented REOTREO reunites for their Bird & Beckett engagement December 1st.

Cost: $20

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