Francis Wong
3-Day Residency
featuring Purple Gums
September 18th - September 20th @Wyldflowr Arts
809 37th St West Oakland, CA 94608
7:00pm doors
$10-20 tickets

Pocket brass band Purple Gums, comprised of the legendary Bobby Bradford (cornet), William Roper (tuba) and Francis Wong (saxophones) performs a tasty gumbo of jazz, free improv, ragtime and classical. The trio’s role is to carry on the tradition of making music in the moment. Charts don’t exist. Rehearsals have never occurred. Ideas are generated and developed on the bandstand.

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Fred Lonberg-Holm w/ Krys Bobrowski and Brenda Hutchinson

Fred Lonberg-Holm is a musician / free improviser currently living in El Cerrito CA. Primarily a cellist, he has also recorded and performed on tenor guitar and trumpet. His focus is on listening to and working with the materials at hand whether from others in the ensemble or the environment.

Brenda Hutchinson is a sound artist and composer. Through her work with large-scale
experiments in socially based improvisations and interactions, Brenda has developed a body of
work based on a perspective about interacting with the public and non-artists through
personal, reciprocal engagement with listening and sounding.

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ROOTSTOCK ARTS presents:

Kjell Nordeson, solo percussion
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duo B. vs. Liberty Ellman
Lisa Mezzacappa, bass
Jason Levis, drums
Liberty Ellman, guitar

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duo B., the San Francisco Bay Area improvising and composing ensemble of percussionist Jason Levis and bassist Lisa Mezzacappa, is a musical think tank of grand schemes and impossible scenarios. For close to 20 years, the ensemble has developed and refined its singular approach to improvisation and composition, through cross-disciplinary projects with film, collaborations with improvising instrumentalists at home and abroad, study of repertoire by like-minded composer-improvisers, and immersion in the improvised-composed musical worlds of masters Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Henry Threadgill, and others.

Guitarist, composer, and educator and engineer/producer Liberty Ellman has performed and or recorded with a host of creative artists including Joe Lovano, Myra Melford, Wadada Leo Smith, Butch Morris, Vijay Iyer, Steve Lehman, Nels Cline, Nicole Mitchell, Stephan Crump, Jonathan Finlayson, Okkyung Lee, and Ches Smith, among others. Ellman is perhaps best known for his long tenure in Henry Threadgill's groundbreaking ensemble, Zooid, which has recorded several critically lauded albums. As a composer and bandleader he has produced several critically acclaimed recordings including: Orthodoxy (Red Giant Records), Tactiles, Ophiuchus Butterfly, Radiate, and Last Desert (Pi Recordings).

Kjell Nordeson is a jazz drummer and a classical percussionist. As a performer of improvised music and jazz since the early nineties, he has played over 1200 concerts in altogether twenty-six different countries. Kjell is featured on over fifty CDs as a member of ensembles in the field of jazz, improvised music, and contemporary music. His musical collaborations include musicians such as Mats Gustafsson, Peter Brötzmann, Barry Guy, Stefano Scodanibbio, Joe Morris, William Parker, Mark Dresser, Lisa Mezzacappa, Larry Ochs, and many others. He is a member of the Bay Area music ensemble sfSound, and his solo percussion album "Walking with Mirabeau" was released to critical acclaim on Not Two Records in 2017.

on his solo percussion project, Walking with Mirabeau:

My drum set and the vibraphone are two remarkably different musical environments. My drum setup, on one hand, has evolved gradually through the years of my practice as an improviser. Cymbals, bells, skins, and wood in various formats and shapes are placed and organized in an idiosyncratic musical environment that is distinctly my own. The vibraphone, on the other hand, is an extremely standardized instrument, characterized by a merciless lack of flexibility in timbre and pitch. If I were to describe my bond with these instruments in emotional terms, I would say that my relationship to the drum set is like a deep friendship, where we adjust to each other, grow, and evolve together. My body is very much in tune with the tactile responses from skin, wood, and metal. My bond to the vibraphone, on the other hand, is more of a love-hate relationship. The unambiguous pitch and timbre of the vibraphone, along with its predictable and uniform envelope of sound, create in me an urge to move forward, musically speaking. It is as if the quality of the sound makes it hard to find a satisfying resting point. The drum set and the vibraphone become, in my mind, two diametrically opposite members of the percussion family. As an improvising musician, I find them both indispensable.

Count Mirabeau spoke to his fellow generals in a speech that is said to have changed the outcome of the French Revolution. Asked about the speech afterwards, he admitted that when he started speaking, he had not been sure how to end it. He trusted his ability to compose whilst speaking; he improvised.
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