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About Us
Mosswood Sound Series
3630 Telegraph Ave
enter 2nd door on 37th St
Oakland CA 94609
2 blocks from macarthur bart :: enter 2nd door on 37th st
vaccination required :: performers will be unmasked
8pm prompt start time (unless otherwise noted)
$10-$25 sliding scale
http://sfsound.org/series/
Upcoming Events:
11
Jun
Sunday, June 11 2023 7:00 PM
ECHO'S BONES
(
Sheldon Brown
+
AMBER LAMPRECHT
+
JOSEPH NOBLE
)
LOW BLEEDS
(
JAY KORBER
+
RANDYLEE SUTHERLAND
)
Pushing a duo of tenor saxophone & drums through the lineage of shearing notes / loud banging which produces a sonic contrast that teeters on the breaking point,
LOW BLEEDS
(
JAY KORBER
, tenor saxophone
RANDYLEE SUTHERLAND
, drums) chew upon the rigid boundaries of music and explore the total uninhibited free form.
No deviation from raw direct performance.
ECHO'S BONES
(
Sheldon Brown
- Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Alto Flute, Bass Flute;
AMBER LAMPRECHT
- Oboe, English Horn, Alto Flute;
JOSEPH NOBLE
- Flute, Alto Flute, Bass Flute) woodwind trio plays improvised music that has been described as “avant pastoralism in a chamber music mode”. Our music develops from the combined timbres of three different acoustic woodwind instruments blending, diverging and conversing, incorporating numerous musical traditions in free improvisational performances.
During the lockdown, a pattern started that has continued to this day: three musicians gathered regularly in a room filled with curly plants to play music together with zero plans, guiding points or directions. With such open parameters in place, they experimented with the sounds of our instruments and played with color, line and texture through free improvisation. The result was ECHO's BONES. Lately, they’ve come out of our living room and have been performing in book-adjacent venues around the Bay Area. They are honored to bring our complimentary flavors, counterpoints, splashes, grunts, squeaks, trills, haunting melodies, and fog horn blasts to Mosswood Chapel.
AMBER LAMPRECHT
, oboe, English horn, flutes. Besides Echo’s Bones, Amber is a member of The Red Room Orchestra, Marc and the Casuals, The Awesome Orchestra Collective, and does session work. She's performed with Sixto Rodriguez, Tony Danza, Jello Biafra, Bart Davenport, Noertker's Moxie, Mark Eitzel, The Vocal Arts Ensemble, The San Luis Obispo Symphony Orchestra, The Shotgun Players, Ted Brinkley’s big band ensembles, and many other groups. Recordings of her music have been used for films, radio, and samples for hip-hop.
Sheldon Brown
, clarinet and bass clarinet, alto and bass flutes, has been active on the Bay Area creative music scene for over 30 years. In 2014, he premiered his commissioned extended work, Blood of the Air, at SFJAZZ’s 32nd Annual San Francisco Jazz Festival, the studio recording being released in 2018. In 2019 he performed a set of his original big-band music at the Tabuleiro Jazz Festival in Minas Gerais, Brazil. He formed
Sheldon Brown
Group in 1996 to perform his original music.
Sheldon Brown
Group has performed at Yoshi’s, SFJazz and many other Bay Area venues. As a member Club Foot Orchestra he has composed and performed music for Club Foot’s scores for Pandora’s Box, Sherlock Jr. and others. He also performs or has performed with Omar Sosa, Anthony Braxton, Electric Squeezebox Orchestra, Clarinet Thing, Ted Brinkley’s big band ensembles, Ben Golderg, and the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra.
JOSEPH NOBLE
, flute, alto flute, bass flute. In addition to Echo’s Bones, Joseph also plays or has played in Ouroboros, Cloud Shepherd, Chamber Cloud, and Ornithos Loom at venues including The Center for New Music, Luggage Store, SIMM Series, Bird and Beckett, Oakland Freedom Jazz Society, and Sonoma Musica Viva: The Music of Edgar Varese and Friends. He has also published three books of poetry.
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18
Jun
Sunday, June 18 2023 7:00 PM
Brett Carson
John Schott
+ CECILIA ENGELHART + ELLEN WEBB
John Schott
's project with dancer ELLEN WEBB and vocalist CECILIA ENGELHART. "It’s improv-y, but with structures and some compositions too. It’s intimate."
Pianist and composer
Brett Carson
plays a set of piano music spanning the 1920’s to the present. The program begins with two of the most significant compositions of Anton Webern: the short and sweet
Kinderstück
(1924), which is the first work he composed using the twelve-tone method, and the
Variations for piano,
Op. 27 (1936) a piece that had a significant impact on the composers of the Darmstadt school in the 50s. Also featured is Nicole Mitchell’s
Interdimensional Interplay
(2016) for live piano with prerecorded flute and with video, which presents a kind of virtual duet between the soloist and Mitchell’s flute. Finally, there are two premieres: Bay Area composer and drummer Jason Levis’s
composition portrait of explanations, or not
(2023 Revision) is presented in a new revision for improvising pianist, and
Brett Carson
presents a new piece for piano and Gameboy.
Brett Carson
is a composer, pianist, improviser, poet, and theater artist based in Oakland. His compositional work, which has been described as "fascinatingly intense" (Stephen Smoliar, SF Classical Voice), explores the juxtaposition of a gleefully chaotic plurality of musical approaches. This is combined with a penchant for surreal world-building and an exploration of the bizarre and uncanny, along with a commitment to writing for the voice and the stage. Notable compositional projects include his song cycle “Mysterious Descent”, a one-act play “Mary's Dilemma, or That Sinking Feeling”, and an experimental chamber opera “Just Visiting (X-Ray Vision)”. His latest song cycle, “The Secret Life of the Paramecium”, premiered in the Bay Area as part of the Dresher Ensemble Artist Residency to sold out audiences in September, 2022.
In addition to his compositional work, he is active as a pianist, keyboardist, and synthesist, performing internationally in the realms of free improvisation, contemporary classical music, jazz, and rock. Performance venues and festivals include the Chicago Jazz Festival, Sons d'hiver, Roulette, the Barbican, the Kennedy Center, the Broad (LA), the Yerba Buena Arts Center, Auditorium Parco della Musica (Rome), and SESC Pompeia (São Paulo). He has worked closely with a wide variety of composers/performers including Bill Baird, Brian Baumbusch, Nicolas Collins, George Lewis, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Bill Noertker, Zeena Parkins, Rent Romus, and William Winant. From 2019-20, he performed as the pianist for the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
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25
Jun
Sunday, June 25 2023 7:00 PM
Nathan Clevenger
+
Jordan Glenn
+
Kasey Knudsen
+ SAFA SHOKRAI +
Cory Wright
USUFRUCT (
Polly Moller
SPRINGHORN +
Tim Walters
)
USUFRUCT
(YOO-zoo-fruckt) is the right of the people to harvest the fruits of common property. The duo Usufruct, consisting of flutist, composer, vocalist/improviser
Polly Moller
SPRINGHORN and computer musician
Tim Walters
, deconstructs, lovingly reassembles, and improvises around found texts and musical materials in the public domain.
Both of us are veterans of the Transbay creative music scene and equally at home in contemporary classical, rock, and freely improvised musics. In founding Usufruct we set out to bring sounds from our free-improvisation vocabularies into a more compositional framework, and set up a creative process where both our minds can wander and come together sonically over sounds and words embedded in Western consciousness. We find them ripe for slicing, dicing, tenderizing, pickling, caramelization, maceration, marinading, and presentation with special sauces.
Nathan Clevenger
TRIO
(Oakland musicians
Nathan Clevenger
,
Jordan Glenn
, and
Cory Wright
) share a long and entwined history of collaboration across various projects, including Wiener Kids, Ashen Cleric, and Fellow Hominids. Formed in 2021, the trio has released 2 albums -- Late Arcade and Sunken Reliquary, and recently initiated a series of collaborations with guests, including
Kasey Knudsen
, Crystal Pascucci, and
SAFA SHOKRAI
. Working from, between, and against Clevenger’s compositional frames and utilizing the multi-instrumental flexibility of each player, the trio (and guests) weaves between non-idiomatic improvisation and often gnomic composed material, with focus on spaciousness and timbral detail.
Nathan Clevenger
is an Oakland born composer and multi-instrumentalist, working on the margins of modern composition, jazz, and improvisation. In 2022, Clevenger released ‘i had a dream about amnesia’, an album compiling 2 suites for solo, duo, and trio configurations, composed and recorded during the Covid-19 lockdown. The eight-piece
Nathan Clevenger
Group has released three albums, including ‘Stateless’ (2019, Slow & Steady Records). Current projects include a trio with
Jordan Glenn
&
Cory Wright
and the improvising chamber ensemble, Ashen Cleric. Notable recent performances include the premieres of extended compositions at the SF Contemporary Jewish Museum (‘for david berman’, performed by Ashen Cleric) and the Exploratorium (‘Ice Hours’, a multimedia collaboration with violinist/composer Kristina Dutton and artist Kim Miskowicz).
Jordan Glenn
spent his formative years in Oregon and in 2006 relocated to the Bay Area where he received an MFA from Mills College. Since then he has been most closely associated with Fred Frith (FF Trio, Gravity Band), William Winant, Zeena Parkins (The Adorables), Roscoe Mitchell, Ben Goldberg, Todd Sickafoose, John Schott, Lisa Mezzacappa (avantNOIR, Glorious Ravage, Lisa Mezzacappa Six), Motoko Honda, Dominique Leone, Michael Coleman and the bands Jack O’ The Clock, Kyle Bruckmann’s Degradient, tUnE-yArDs, and the Oakland Active Orchestra. He has also worked with Rhys Chatham, Secret Chiefs 3, The Rova Sax Quartet, composer/bagpiper Matthew Welch and has been commissioned to create scores for evening-length dance pieces by Sharp & Fine and Liss Fain Dance. As a leader he has composed and conducted the trio Wiener Kids, Mindless Thing (a collaboration with poet Jim Ryan) and the percussion heavy large ensemble BEAK.
Reeds player and composer
Cory Wright
studied music at Oberlin Conservatory and the University of Southern California and has been involved in both the jazz and creative music worlds for the past 20 years, including time spent in New York, Los Angeles and his current home in the San Francisco Bay Area. His recent projects reflect his interest in blurring the distinction between composed and improvised music, and in combining the harmonious with the atonal, the grooving with the arrhythmic. Wright has performed in ensembles led by Anthony Braxton, Vinny Golia, Todd Sickafoose, Adam Rudolph and Yusef Lateef. He is currently a member of Bristle, the
Nathan Clevenger
Group, and Goggle (saxophone quartet) and leads his own projects Fellow Hominids and The Green Mitchell Trio.
Kasey Knudsen
is a San Francisco-based saxophonist, composer & educator. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Jazz Composition from Berklee College of Music in 2002. She has been dubbed “one of the region’s most esteemed saxophonists” (Andrew Gilbert, San Francisco Classical Voice, 2018) and has “quietly become one of the essential voices in the Bay Area jazz scene” (Andrew Gilbert, East Bay Express, 2014). In addition to leading a number of her own projects, as a co-leader, she is involved in several groups including the Schimscheimer Family Trio, the Holly Martins, and the Klaxon Mutant Allstars. Knudsen collaborates frequently with many of the most unique musical voices in the Bay Area including multiple performances across the US and Europe with Tune-Yards, Fred Frith and the Gravity Band, the Charlie Hunter Quartet, Erik Jekabson, the Ian Carey Quintet + 1, Ben Goldberg, the Electric Squeezebox Orchestra, Beth Schenck, and many more.
SAFA SHOKRAI
is inspired by solid objects and abstract concepts. He strives to create the soundtrack for the film we all live in. Based in the Bay Area, Safa Shokrai has performed in many bands as both a freelancer and band leader in his 25 years as a professional musician. He has had the opportunity to study with jazz legend Ray Brown, the late great Jeff Chambers, and local stalwart Marcus Shelby. Safa has had the opportunity to travel around the world making music and brings all the music styles he has absorbed into his practice, from Tuareg to South Indian to European Romani. Currently he is working on composing new music for several bands he is involved with, including The Lost Shapes and Levitator, and is looking forward to recording some albums this year.
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