The second annual Switchboard Music Festival is an 8-hour, non-stop music spectacle presenting composers and musicians who push the boundaries of their respective genres. No other Bay Area music festival or concert series offers such an eclectic, genre-crossing, convention-breaking, bastardizing group of experimentalists, innovators, and musical omnivores in a single event. This is a concert designed for an audience grown accustomed to the boundary-free world of the internet and the iPod, where all music is equal and must meet only one criterion: It must sound good.
The Switchboard Music Festival will feature some of the Bay Area’s most original performers, including the ADORNO Ensemble, Classical Revolution, Edmund Welles, Japonize Elephants, Melody of China, Moe! Staiano,
Pamela Z, Paul Dresher and Joel Davel, Ted Brinkley and Neptune's Rogue Apothecary, and Zoyres. The festival will also present living composers whose work challenges traditional ideas of notated music, including Mason Bates, Ryan Brown, Jonathan Russell, Max Stoffregen, Ken Thomson, and Damon Waitkus.
The Switchboard Music Festival was founded by local composers and performers Jeff Anderle, Ryan Brown, and Jonathan Russell with the goal of bringing together many of the unique musicians working in the Bay Area. Their goal is to highlight musicians and composers who effortlessly float between genres, challenging and re-defining the music scene, Bay Area and beyond.
ADORNO Ensemble captivates audiences through live chamber music performances, vital public dialogue, and multifaceted, innovative programming. Richard Scheinin of the San Jose Mercury News hailed a recent concert as, "...a beautiful, blazing performance by the ADORNO Ensemble, a crackerjack new music band that plays with conviction and vitality and blows the dust off classical music."
The mission of Classical Revolution is to present concerts involving both traditional and modern approaches while engaging the community by offering chamber music performances in highly accessible venues, such as bars and cafes, and collaborating with local musicians and artists from various styles and backgrounds.
Damon Waitkus is a composer and songwriter. Much of his recent work has been for recorded media, combining field recordings collected from various natural, domestic, and urban environments with passages for traditional instruments.
Edmund Welles, the bass clarinet quartet, has the distinction of being the world's only original, composing band of four bass clarinetists, they invent and perform heavy chamber music. There is no precedent for a wind-based ensemble such as this attempting to build these massive bridges between avant jazz, new music, black metal and classic rock.
Ted Brinkley's music sounds like jazz, but in truth is the sum total of a vast range of sonic environments that he finds stimulating. In his music there are copious quantities of written material bracketed by moments of free and/or collective improvisation. There are grooves, some of which come and go at the whim of the rhythm section. Some of it "swings," some of it "rocks."
Japonize Elephants plays self-described “hard-core gypsy circus bluegrass klezmer pirate clown madness”—blink and you’ll think you’re back in the orchestra of a French circus, with Mingus and Willie Nelson sitting in, with songs fusing Appalachia with Romania, Vegas with Marrakesh.
A uniquely creative and versatile musician, composer and clarinetist, Jonathan Russell is active in a wide variety of music, from classical to experimental to klezmer to church music, and has composed for ensembles ranging from orchestra to bass clarinet quartet to rock band.
Ken Thomson is a Brooklyn-based clarinetist, saxophonist, and composer. In demand as a composer and freelancer in many settings, he moves quickly between genres and scenes, bringing a fiery intensity and emotional commitment to every musical situation.
Mason Bates composes for a wide variety of media, with a portfolio of orchestral, chamber, theatrical, and electronic works. Spanning the classical concert hall to the clubs and lounges where he DJs electronica, his music was hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "lovely to hear and ingeniously constructed."
Max Stoffregen is a San Francisco based composer and keyboardist who has written music for a variety of genres, from songs for children's chorus, electro-acoustic ensembles of various configurations, to multi-movement works for chamber orchestra.
Melody of China is the premiere Chinese music ensemble based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The ensemble has a two-fold mission: to promote Chinese classical, folk and contemporary music, and to provide quality entertainment through the synergy between an ancient cultural tradition and youthful, multi-colored American culture.
Moe! Staiano is a percussionist who usually uses found objects, but has moved to doing drumming on found objects on his trap set. One can expect to see Moe!'s show as a visual eye pleaser: running around throwing pipes on concrete, walking on pans with his feet to mute sounds or running amok, throwing his body into old cassette tapes or two dozen cymbals in any given performance.
Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and audio artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, and sampling technology. She creates solo works that combine operatic bel canto and experimental extended vocal techniques with found percussion objects, spoken word, and sampled concrète sounds.
As both a composer and performer, Paul Dresher is uniquely able to integrate different musical influences into a coherent and remarkably personal style. A polymath who makes music in an astounding variety of ways, he composes and performs experimental opera and music theater, chamber and orchestral music, and instrumental electro-acoustic music.
Composer Ryan Brown draws heavily on his omnivorous musical tastes, including the myriad rock and pop genres, jazz, minimalism, gamelan, and mbira, while maintaining a unique sound that directly imitates none of these. His works are often noted for their energy and off-kilter, foot-tapping rhythms and have been called "modern composed music at its best; nimble, expressive, ear-turning and strange in an accessible way, highly virtuosic but never pretentious." (Washington City Paper)
The Zoyres energy and sound is complex and catchy, dynamic and dancy, down-home and dirty, alternately cerebral and simple, dark and delightful. Drawing from Eastern European folk music, free improvisation, jazz, rock, and drum-n-bass, the Zoyres recipe is a fusion nonpareil; an exciting new taste from Old World flavors!
Cost: Sliding $10-35