Dresher Ensemble Studio
2201 Poplar St Oakland
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Edgetone Records celebrates 35 years on planet Earth with a series of showcase performances.
Rent Romus' Life's Blood Ensemble
The Holly Martins

In 1991 saxophonist Rent Romus launched his independent label Edgetone Records. Originally it was a vanity label to support his recordings, but in the year 2000 he decided it should become an entity to support original music crossing the boundaries of genre focused on D.I.Y. (do it yourself) artists looking for a ground base and label identity.


Rent Romus' Life's Blood Ensemble pays tribute as well as brings to light, reinvents, deconstructs, and delves into the deep realms of their collective vision. Their repertoire features original composition and contemporary local and international composers while exploring the influences and inspirations of jazz and improvisation. The Life's Blood began in 1999 while Romus was on tour in Northern Europe as a trio with Danish drummer Stefan Pasborg and bassist Jonas Westergaard. Returning to the San Francisco Bay Area, Romus recreated and expanded the roster to feature some of the best musicians the San Francisco region has to offer presenting a broad range of original music from expansive thematic jazz suites to composers' forums and features:

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


Named after the main character in the classic postwar film, The Third Man, The Holly Martins is a trio of Bay Area musicians dedicated to exploring the boundaries of jazz-infused improvised music, but without the trappings of a traditional "rhythm section". This configuration requires each individual to simultaneously take on multiple roles typically assigned individual players (soloist versus accompanist), thereby promoting more open-ended explorations of the material. As to said material, The Holly Martins often construct mutations of normal jazz standards, transformed from their more familiar forms in the time domain. Likewise, their original compositions are often "jazz-like", but with twists and turns such as asymmetric harmonic rhythms, cycling rhythmic and pitch patterns, etc.

Kasey Knudsen - alto saxophone Eric Vogler - Guitar Lorin Benedict - Voice


Cost: $10-25 Sliding Scale

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