Outfest!
Five Consecutive Sundays of Spontaneous Jazz
Bird & Beckett’s Which Way West? concert series, in association with Outsound Presents:
Forward Energy was founded in 1998 and had it’s first gig at Radio Valencia in San Francisco that year. The group has gone through several incarnations employing top Bay Area musicians including: Eddie Gale of Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures fame, Alicia Mangan an extraordinarily advanced tenor player, and
Scott R. Looney. Forward Energy has played up and down the West Coast as well as in the Midwest and New York City. The current formation includes founder
Jim Ryan (who played on Steve Lacy’s weekly jam sessions in Paris during the early 70’s) on flute, saxes, and trumpet, and original member
Scott R. Looney on piano. Scott received his BA in music from Coe College, Iowa and an MFA from Cal Arts. He has been a pillar of the experimental music community since the late 90’s. The group also includes
Rent Romus on alto, soprano, and c-melody saxes. He studied with Stan Getz and is a power both on his horn and as an organizer and promoter of the Bay Area experimental music community. Eric Marshall is a regular bassist with Eddie Gale’s groups and he works in all genres of the jazz idiom. Percussionist
Timothy Orr studied with Ed Blackwell and plays all styles from zydeco to free jazz. Recordings of Forward Energy can be found on
Edgetone Records and also at
Cadence Jazz Records 1162.
OUTFEST!, in five successive Sundays, will ignore the boundaries, clamber across the structures, whisper in the tunnels, scream in the public square. Fractal geometries of sound in a den of books.
Bird & Beckett Books and Records is located at 653 Chenery St. between Diamond and Castro in San Francisco’s Glen Park.
1 1/2 blocks from the Glen Park BART station and MUNI lines 23, 36, 44, 52 & J-Church.
By car, take the Monterey exit off I-280 South, or the Bosworth exit off I-280 North.
Cost: $5-10
Videos featuring musicians playing at this event
Green Alembic at Berkeley Arts 5-17-14
Scott R. Looney, Lisa Mezzacapa, and Donald Robinson at Berkeley Arts Fest space - May 31, 2014
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