The superb series and beautiful acoustics at the Crane House (near Ashby Bart – for address/directions contact joe@joelasqo.com) have made it into one of the most interesting places to hear improv & new music in the Bay Area.
Sandy Ewen and friend
Set 1, 8pm: Sandy Ewen – Joe Lasqo – “Jacob L”
Sandy Ewen's new album, Tributaries
Following her recording last year with Bay Area improv expats Damon Smith and Weasel Walter, and a stream of great recordings with the group Weird Weeds, Canadian-born/Texas-based guitarist Sandy Ewen has followed up with a brilliant album, Tributaries, based on her micro-collages.
Sandy Ewen
Sandy’s visual work is closely tied to her work in sound; she uses both mediums to explore texture, composition and materials.
Sandy Ewen - untitled, 2012, mixed media micocollage
Sandy’s microcollages, enlarged through projection and digital printing, are an exploration of material and technique. Using a unique process pioneered by the artist, natural materials and polymers are torn, liquefied, scorched, melted, cut, and fused. When enlarged, the microscopic nuances of these manipulations are manifested in exquisite detail.
Sandy Ewen, solo guitar 2012 (photo by David Dove)
As an improviser in both art and music, Ewen sees herself as guiding materials and space rather than executing a preconceived composition. “I like to explore mediums and materials and tease out their essence,” says Ewen.
Sandy Ewen - untitled, 2012, polymer microcollage
“Working with slide projections has focused my eye on the subtitles of natural processes of decay and transformation. Through my work, I am asking questions of the materials rather than dictating answers.”
Joe Lasqo @ Meridian Gallery, 11 Jan 2012 (Photo: PeterBKaars.com, http://www.peterbkaars.com)
I’m keenly looking forward to playing with Sandy and further exploring her multimedia perspective and the new musical strategies it gives rise to.
Plus, we’ll be joined by mysterious less-is-more master of multiple clarinets, “Jacob L“.
Set 2, 9pm: RTD3, the hypersensitive improv trio of Ron Heglin (trombone, voice), Tom Nunn (invented instruments), and Doug Carroll (cello).
RTD3 @ Meridian Gallery, 20 Feb 2010
L → R: Ron Heglin, Doug Carroll, Tom Nunn (Photo: Dill Pixels)
All 3 players span the full range from percussive to melodic… sometimes within the same note. Although Ron Heglin and Doug Carroll use conventional instruments, their explorations of extended technique (viz. playing the cello upside down) enable them to use their instruments as sound synthesizers of a most unconventional sort. Coupled with leading instrument inventor and improv phenomenologist, Tom Nunn, in the long standing improvising trio, RTD3, they become a 6-eared vibration-telepathy music monster whose sonic lair you’ll want to enter.
Ron Heglin (photo by Tom Djll / Djll Pixels)
Ron Heglin is a trombonist and vocalist working with extended technique on the trombone and with spoken and sung imaginary languages as a vocalist. His vocal music has been influenced by his study of North Indian vocal music. He works both compositionally and in an improvisational mode and is a member of the Bay Area music context as well as performing internationally. He is a founding member of the groups Music for All Occasions, Rotodoti (= RTD3 + Tim Perkis), Dynosoar (with Tom Djll and Karen Stackpole), and Brassiosuarus, has performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Brant, Logos Duo, Tim Perkis, John Bischoff, Kattt Atchley, Toyoji Tomita (富田豊治), and is my bandmate in Jim Ryan’s Green Alembic.
He has these words to say about his music “process”:
“I think we choose a tuning for ourselves early on and then gather those practices together to support and enhance that tuning and this practice becomes our way to know what we are experiencing in the everyday, and if we neglect these practices that constitute our music then we lose our awareness of what we are experiencing. Often it seems that when I begin to sing or play there are surprises in my consciousness and in my body and and there is this task of integrating this new information: this is the practice, or part of it. This is the edge of not knowing and the acceptance of this edge seems a very exciting place and hopefully continues to be a place where new integrations (or awareness of chaos) can take place.
Is this place the void?”
Tom Nunn playing his invented instrument, The Crab
Tom Nunn (interview, bio) has designed, built and performed with original musical instruments since 1976, and has built over 200 instruments.
His instruments typically utilize commonly available materials, are sculptural in appearance, utilize contact microphones for amplification, and are designed specifically for improvisation with elements of ambiguity, unpredictability and nonlinearity. Tom has performed extensively throughout the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years, as well as in other parts of the U.S., Canada, Europe, and New Zealand, both as soloist and with other musicians. Tom also performs with T.D. Skatchit, RTD3, Ghost In The House, Music For Hard Times (duo with Paul Winstanley) and has appeared on a number of recordings, including his solo CD, Identity, T.D. Skatchit & Company, Skatch Migration, and others on Edgetone Records. In 1998, he published Wisdom of the Impulse: On the Nature of Musical Free Improvisation.
In 2013 he was the subject of a major retrospective concert at the CMC in San Francisco and late last year opened his own sonic musical invention laboratory to the weird listening public as The Nunnery.
I recently joined Tom and Paul Winstanley at Crane House with Music For Hard Times, and the wonderful acoustics there brought out all the sensitivity of his ear and imagination, so listeners can expect the beautifully unexpected.
Doug Carroll & friend
Doug Carroll is a cellist, composer, and audio engineer and has a BA in Music from the University of Alabama and an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College. Doug attended music classes at the Royal Conservatory in Den Hague and Darmstadt International Summer Courses. He completed composition studies including with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Lou Harrison and Anthony Braxton; additionally, he performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s world premier of Ocean, with music composed by John Cage. With an emphasis in improvisation, Doug has also performed at Seattle Improvised Music Festival, Sound Symposium, and the Birmingham Improvised Music Festival with Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith.
His solo improvisations have received international acclaim for their stark originality and musical sensitivity (and plenty of acclaim here in the Bay Area too!). I’m delighted to be his bandmate Jim Ryan’s Green Alembic.
Doug Carroll's Music For Cello And Wild Animals
Doug is also an expert field recordist, especially of animal and bird sounds, and his blendings of solo cello with these field recordings offer a special world of beautiful animal-human collaboration. His interweaving of cello lines and birdsong in the album Music For Cello and Wild Animals is serenely mesmerizing and unforgettable,
Join us for a night of limpid and ear-opening free improv with masters from the Bay Area and beyond…
Joe