thee dialectic, a new piece by Gust Burns, explores dynamics engendered by the difference between the continuous and the discrete. Through compositional strategies of syncope and sustain, this most basic of dialectical relations is clarified, developed, and complexified across an open compositional framework for sextet (2 basses, 2 violins, 2 saxophones). Improvising trio Fidelities (Gust Burns, piano; Troy Schiefelbein, vocals; Mark Kaylor, drums) moves across the sextet’s sonic field, variously engaging, deferring, and catalyzing those dynamics farther. “Lyrics” for thee dialectic are borrowed from various sources, including but not limited to Funkadelic and Frantz Fanon.

Basses: John Seman, John Teske
Violins:  Hanna Broback, Noel Kennon
Saxophones: Neil Welch, Jacob Zimmerman

Jacob Zimmerman‘s The (in)complete Charlie Parker comprises 54 compositions by Charlie Parker performed in succession on alto saxophone.

Day three of the What’s Going On festival, with two conduction events, one with strings plus guests and one with all percussion plus guests, with an incredible line up of phenomenal Seattle improvisers and stellar out of town guests.

What’s Going On: Conduction, Improvisation, and the Culture of Structure honors the work and lives of Lawrence “Butch” Morris, Sun Ra, and Henry Threadgill. The festival celebrates the innovations and musical philosophies of these three mid-century African American musical conceptualists, all of whom created highly personal approaches to structural integrity in music. They all borrowed concepts from a wide range of traditions, eschewing European conventions while looking for new ways to expand beyond the traditional assumptions inherent in the music commonly known as jazz.

November 14^th at the Chapel features two large ensembles, Kin of the Moon Orchestra and Manual de Ritmo de Percussion con Senas, each performing a set of conductions based on themes by Morris, Threadgill, Sun Ra, Roscoe Mitchell, Carla Bley, Wayne Horvitz, and Julius Hemphill. The first ensemble is a string chamber orchestra and the second is an ensemble of nine percussionists. Featured soloists include Leanna Keith, Brandon Ross, Ingrid Laubrock and Robin Holcomb.

“Conduction” is a technique in which the artist uses hand symbols to orchestrate the music of an ensemble of improvisers. Elements of written music are sometimes used, often not. This technique has roots in various music traditions but was formalized and came into common practice largely due to the efforts of Lawrence “Butch” Morris. Mr. Morris passed a decade ago, and the festival began as an homage to his legacy, and the spirit of re-­imagining notions of structure in music.

Co-presented South Hudson Music Project and Nonsequitur.

Composers Nat Evans and John Teske present an evening of music, joined by acclaimed cellist Lori Goldston.

Landscape and a sense of place are recurring themes in the composers’ work, including scores that resemble maps and field recordings that echo a forest in transition. Warm Buchla‑synth tones, long bass drones, and Goldston’s singular cello voice invite listeners to access the landscape within, an embodied sound experience.

The program unfolds as a single, continuous piece — a series of movements by Teske and Evans woven together. Long‑time collaborators, this evening of work reflects more than a decade of ideas and a close friendship shared in music.

Nat Evans is a composer and artist whose interdisciplinary works range from site-specific events and installations to chamber music, scores for dance and film, conceptual works based in ecology and social practice, to meditations on everyday life. His work is regularly presented across the United States, and has also been presented in Europe, South America, Australia and China. Evans has received numerous commissions including The Henry, Odeon Quartet, San Francisco MOMA, Seattle Art Museum, The City of Tomorrow, Portland Cello Project, ALL RISE, The Box Is Empty, and Newfields Museum, among others. Works and events by Evans have been featured on WNYC’s New Sounds and BBC3, as well as in LA Weekly, WIRED, The New York Times, VICE, Tiny Mix Tapes, The Believer and numerous other publications. His work has appeared at galleries such as Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, Interstitial, SOIL, The Frye Art Museum, Greg Kucera, as well as Mediate Art Soundwave Biennial, Aqua Art Miami, Dog Star Orchestra, NEPO 5k, and other festivals. He studied music at Butler University with Michael Schelle, Craig Hetrick and Frank Felice.

John Teske is a Seattle-based composer writing contemporary concert music and presenting site-specific performances. He has written works for soloists, chamber ensembles, and chamber orchestras, which have been performed across the Americas and Europe. Teske’s compositional approach balances intentional composition with spontaneous expression. He uses algorithmic techniques to generate scores and musical systems that incorporate chance, variation, and improvisation. He experiments with distilling musical concepts to their essence and aims to write music that can be performed by any ensemble of instruments. Teske’s work has been supported by organizations such as the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, the Jack Straw Foundation, and the City of Seattle.

Hosted by Debacle Records. Doors open at 7:30.

Two of the Pacific Northwest’s most lovely experimental artists have recently put out work that deserves celebrating. Spiritual Exit (Aaron Davis) has released Fragment, a record built from pieces of his own history spanning back to 1999, reconstructed into something that honors nostalgia without surrendering to it. His moving drones, layering guitars and reprocessed sources create these emotional arcs that feel like loss and hope stacked recursively building towards the sky. Meanwhile, John Swanke just dropped the first chapter of his rain country music – stark Americana-inflected guitars, woozy synths, and beautiful field recordings on local label Eiderdown. It’s really something special. Rounding out the evening is Sonora Enjambre, who creates swarms of cascading sound designed for spiritual respite and reflection, guided sonic journeys that prioritize the regenerative power of deep listening. Come out and celebrate these certified rippers.

Spiritual Exit (Aaron Davis) is a Portland-based experimental musician with over 25 years of practice in drone and ambient music. Previously known for his project Acre (early 2000s-2016), which earned critical acclaim for technical innovation and appeared on decade-best lists alongside Tim Hecker and Yellow Swans, Spiritual Exit represents an evolution toward more dynamic emotional territories while maintaining his commitment to heavy and immersive sounds.

John Swanke is a Camano Island-based instrumentalist exploring what he calls “rain country” music, a deeply personal approach that bridges experimental guitar work with regional landscape and ambient tones. John’s practice is rooted in collaboration and a contemplative pride in his natural surroundings.

Sonora Enjambre (Sombra) is a descendant of the Condor y la Aguila who dwells on Duwamish land. Often times, we are inundated with the distraction of “reality and responsibility” and denied what is needed for our spirits to regenerate. Sonorous respite is the desired experience to be shared, reflection for the soul is encouraged, open hearts are welcome.

Clarinetist/composer Eric Mandat will present an evening of solo and group improvisations featuring his unique sonic landscapes that draw from his more than 40 years of explorations with clarinet multiphonics, microtones, and timbral modulations, and further sculpted through his use of interactive technologies. Joining Eric will be Seattle woodwind luminaries Kate Olson, James Falzone, Sean Osborn, and Jesse Canterbury.

Eric has received numerous awards for his work as a composer, and his solo compositions have become staples in the repertoire of adventurous clarinetists throughout the world. Eric tours regularly as a concert soloist. He was a member of the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW ensemble for 15 seasons, and he performed with the eclectic experimental sextet Tone Road Ramblers for nearly 30 years. Eric is currently Visiting Professor of Clarinet and Distinguished Scholar at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where has taught since 1981.

DeKirÖpp is a new trio dedicated to rhythm featuring Jim DeJoie, Steve Kirk and Brian Oppel that dives into exploratory moods through both improvisation and through-composed music! We seek to find the true basis of music through vertical harmony and rhythmic drive. Never losing sight of melody, each player is at once an accompanist and soloist. The improvisation is based on melody and form with the freedom of non-judgmental experimentations. Made up of some of Seattle’s finest, DekirÖpp has played many festivals (including Earshot’s “Jazz in the Second Century) as well as numerous gigs throughout the Seattle area.  Tonight’s performance will also feature visuals by Steve Kennedy Williams.

Three members of the Tom Baker Quartet (Tom Baker, guitar; Brian Cobb, bass; Greg Campbell, drums) will be joined by saxophonist Neil Welch in a set of composed and improvised music. The Tom Baker Quartet combines carefully composed and sometimes complex music with open-ended improvisation and strong grooves. Their album Begin Again was awarded the Earshot Jazz award for Northwest Album of the Year in 2023. Neil Welch has carved out a niche as a specialist in soprano, tenor, baritone, and bass saxophones, creating powerful and original music as a solo artist and with groups such as Bad Luck and the Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble.

Fresh from East Coast tour, Lori Goldston delivers an immersive, transportive improvised solo cello set.

Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, possessor of a restless, semi-feral spirit, Lori Goldston is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer and teacher from Seattle. Her voice as a cellist, amplified or acoustic, is full, textured, committed and original. A relentless inquirer, her work drifts freely across borders that separate genre, discipline, time and geography.

“Masked, warrantless, unmarked vans, statelessness as policy. Is that mole new? Can you take a look, I can’t get quite the right angle on it.”

This performance features four improvisers – Caroline Kraabel (sax/voice), Kelsey Mines (double-bass/voice), Gregg Miller (clarinet/sax/voice) and Anjali Grant (live drawing) – using sounds, images, and words to conjure and make present the weird contemporaneity of normality and growing dis-ease under contemporary fascism. What is an anti-fascist aesthetic? Given our complex feelings of rage and paralysis, terror and disbelief, the incongruence of domesticity and resistance, is there hope to be found in improvising together?

Originally from Seattle, inveterate improviser of the London scene Caroline Kraabel is a saxophonist, artist, composer, author, and organizer. She has worked with many excellent improvisers, including Robert Wyatt, Maggie Nicols, John Edwards, Louis Moholo, Cleveland Watkiss, Hyelim Kim, Pat Thomas, Susan Alcorn, Sarah Washington, and Charlotte Hug.

Kelsey Mines is a Seattle-based bassist, composer, and educator. Mines has been a featured artist for the Earshot Jazz Festival, Wayward Music Series, and the Ballard Jazz Festival. In 2019, Mines received the Earshot Jazz Golden Ear Award for Emerging Artist. Mines currently teaches at Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University.

Gregg Miller is a Seattle-based improviser who started Sonic Action Records to document the vibrant creative/improvisational music scene in Seattle. He has taught political theory at the University of Washington, Western Washington University, Lewis & Clark College, Brooklyn College, and elsewhere. He thinks of improvisational music as political theory.

Anjali Grant is a Seattle-based visual artist and practicing architect. She has exhibited work in New York, Chicago, Portland, Bellingham, Nairobi, and Seattle, and has designed countless record covers for improvising and avant-garde musicians.

Join the Seattle Chamber Orchestra for an unforgettable evening celebrating Italian avantgarde composer Luciano Berio and American mezzo Cathy Berberian, a trailblazing power couple who reshaped the sound world of the 20th century. The program also includes music of Monteverdi, Ghedini, Dallapiccola, and Cage.

Doors open 7 PM; pre-concert talk at 7:15; concert starts at 8 PM.

Seattle Chamber Orchestra’s mission is to gather world-class musicians, to curate and perform chamber and orchestral repertoire that uplifts, inspires, and celebrates live performances. Brought to life through thoughtful and at times risky, programming that educates as much as inspires, SCO seeks to evolve and reinvigorate classical music, which has suffered most of all during the pandemic, by providing paid opportunities for professional musicians to explore traditional and new music in a sort of continuum space-temporal and push the boundaries of programming beyond those of other orchestras. SCO reaffirms the value of live music by bringing adventurous repertoire to eager and open-minded audiences. 

Founded in 2021, the Seattle Chamber Orchestra is rooted in our cherished Pacific Northwest’s casual and open culture and brings together the region’s top instrumentalists to create an all-sensory experience of music where you are invited to be part of the experience rather than merely witnessing it. SCO seeks to bring music lovers tantalizing combinations of the traditional and contemporary repertoire, performed by world-class professional musicians. 

Vancouver-born award-winning pianist/composer Cat Toren leads Cat Toren’s HUMAN KIND, a dynamic Brooklyn-based quartet with Xavier Del Castillo (sax), Jake Leckie (bass), and Steven Crammer (drums). Described by UK Vibe as “vibrant, earthy and spiritual”, this project is influenced by the free-form, socially conscious jazz of the late ’60s, reimagined for the modern day. The group will perform music from their self-titled debut album as well as from Scintillating Beauty, their 2020 release on Panoramic Recordings that reached the NPR and New York Times Jazz Critics Polls, and was featured in The Best New Jazz on Bandcamp.

Gathering threads from the corners of her imagination to tell stories of creatures and places of folklore yet to be written, Every Shade of Green is the performance project of Carolyn b (Mt Fog). She uses her voice as instrument along with synthesizer, violin and whatever else inspires, looping sounds and improvising as the moment requires. Melodies that feel like memories mingle with elements that call from early music (particularly the works of Hildegard von Bingen), art pop, and ambient. “Domus de Janas (“House of the Fairies”) are underground tombs cut into rocky hillsides that resemble the homes of the living. Constructed 5000 years ago in modern-day Sardinia, these stone houses feature spiral pattern decorations, many chambers, and false doors. I recently came upon the knowledge that I’ve seen these so-called Fairy Houses in dreams of mine. This evening’s Every Shade of Green set will traverse these ancient and dream spaces, asking questions about the borders between the living and the dead, the interior and the exterior, and the coziness of imagining life as moss on a rock.”

Curated by Christopher Icasiano for Nonsequitur’s NonSeq series.