This trio concert celebrates the return of free jazz saxophonist Booker T. Williams Jr., a legend of Seattle late-night jam sessions in the 1960s, who has come back to Seattle after forty years in NYC jamming with the giants of the jazz avant garde, including Archie Shepp, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, and Henry Threadgill. Booker joins Greg Campbell on drums and bassist Pete Leinonen, who frequently accompanied Booker T. in those late night sessions at The Llahngaelhyn and The Vault, and is proud to be reunited with Booker T.  Seattle music lovers may know Greg from his work in straight-ahead jazz and free improvisation, classical and jazz French horn playing, or traditional West African drumming. Anything can and probably will happen.

Partners is a new suite of music for septet composed by Michael Owcharuk (piano), featuring Kate Olson (saxophones), Alex Guy (violin), Heather Bentley (viola), Maria Scherer Wilson (violoncello), Abbey Blackwell (bass), and Kyle Doran (drums). The piece explores different aspects of partnership: a spouse, friend, parent, child, co-worker, fellow commuter, shopkeeper, all the great and small partnerships we form short- and long-term through our lives. The music is based on themes from Ukrainian folk, tango, Berber folk, and Americana, and are treated in combined classical and jazz forms to highlight individual musician’s expression on the topic through improvisation and orchestration.

Composition and performance of this project is funded largely by an award from the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture’s City Artist Grant.

Michael Owcharuk is a composer, pianist, and dance accompanist working in jazz, classical, Ukrainian folk, rock/pop, and music for theater and dance. He has create pieces for many local and regional ensembles, theater companies, dance companies, and is an accompanist for the Pacific Northwest Ballet School and Mark Morris’ Dance for Parkinsons. He and his music have been featured by NPR and KEXP and he has been granted multiple awards from The Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, 4Culture, and Jack Straw Productions. Michael is proud to have written and to keep writing for the Lviv Virtuoso Orchestra in Ukraine, a stalwart and brave group of musicians defiantly presenting music for their people during the ongoing war.  

Stone and Sky is the improvisational musical project of Trevor Eulau and Tara, centered around exploring friendship and connection through music. Tara and Trevor have been playing together for five years, and have become close musically and creatively. Before Trevor moves to Pittsburgh in June, Tara and Trevor wanted to perform under Stone and Sky to explore their dear friendship, and welcome listeners into their warm musical space. The concert will feature a simple set up — Trevor playing the acoustic guitar and Tara with their tenor saxophone. They will be glad to welcome you, and celebrate together the energies of connectivity and mutual trust.

Doors open 7 PM, music starts at 8 PM.

In celebration of the cassette release of new cascades, the 2024 album from Portland-based producer Alvin Fenner (neat beats), TOKO TAPE is proud to present an evening of woodwinds and electronics. Fenner will be joined by local Seattle saxophonist Morgan O. and multi-instrumental sound artist sous chef. In addition to the music, Portland-based tea pop-up Apa Kabar will be serving a curated selection of loose-leaf teas. 

Established in 2005 neat beats (Portland), combines the soundscapes of new age plunderphonics, field recordings, and 90s boom bap to create a soundtrack to your weirdest dreams. His independently released debut album, Cosmic Surgery, released in 2011, gained unexpected notoriety and a cult following in the experimental beat scene, establishing a unique sound, subsequently built on by Sleep Cycles and new cascades.

Morgan O. is a saxophonist from Seattle. Her music weaves electronic textures, drones, and waves of sound with saxophone melodies that emerge out of a practice of improvisation, deep listening, and collaboration with performance artists, dancers, and visual artists.

A culinary master of audio food, sous chef is always cookin’ up new recipes. He sleeps & works out of La Cuisine, the studio he built just south of Seattle, performing locally, producing, composing & exploring new flavors, courses & musical meals to delight your eardrums. From ambient to epic, electronic to acoustic, his latest forays have led him down paths of site-specificity, traveling around the world, combining ancient & cutting edge sounds, with an ever-growing list of collaborators. He’s also a founding member of the band sunking & high pulp.

TOKO TAPE is a tape label based out of Portland started by DJ & producer Joshua Limanjaya. The label believes in the importance of physical media and distributes its music exclusively through the release of limited edition cassette tapes (with digital files on Bandcamp available to own only through the purchase of a tape). Since its start in December of 2025, the label has put out a diverse catalog of sounds that range from ambient, shoegaze, instrumental hip-hop, and more. Beyond just putting out music, TOKO TAPE aims to archive and preserve the sounds of a region, the artists that shape their local culture, and the moments in time that bring these things together. 

Marble takes its name from the way life actually moves — not in straight lines, but in swirls. People enter and leave. Moments press into each other. Different textures, colors, and temperatures share the same glass. Edelmar and Achil Obenza invite you into that swirl — through music, image, and word — as a reminder that even in the marbling, there is pattern. Even in the chaos, there is beauty. And even as people come and go, community remains the thing that holds us.

Edelmar is a Seattle-based musician, photographer, and storyteller whose work lives at the intersection of sound and image. Whether he’s at the piano or behind a lens, he is drawn to the moments that don’t announce themselves — the quiet weight of a person in their element, the breath before a note lands. Rooted in the Filipino value of Kapwa — the understanding that the self is never separate from the other — his creative practice is less about self-expression and more about shared recognition. In Marble, Edelmar brings both music and visual work, weaving together two languages that have always, for him, been saying the same thing.

Achil grew up in a café — a place where people passed through daily, carrying their stories and experiences from all seasons of life. From childhood to adulthood she watched how things shifted monumentally over time, how people came and went, how the world was infinitely shifting, marbling into something new. She has lived many lifetimes in one: a creative childhood rooted in song, art, and composition, a young woman finding her voice, and then a mother learning an entirely new voice. Poetry came in the stolen moments. The quiet in-between times. A way to synthesize the existential pains of grief and loss for what has been with the perpetual process of renewal that takes place on every level. Through Marble, Achil brings her compositions, her voice, and her poetry to the stage as testimony: that life doesn’t move in lines, it swirls — and every ending is also, somehow, a beginning.

Curated by Gretchen Yanover for Nonsequitur’s NonSeq series.

Seattle electronic musician Brad Loving makes his improvisational debut with a custom-built sequencer, weaving live-sampled textures into evolving polymetric and polyrhythmic frameworks.

Brad Loving has spent three decades working with electroacoustic sound — from Chicago’s experimental music community to a decade at New York’s avant-garde venue The Kitchen. His band Reunion Island has released two albums recorded with John McEntire of Tortoise. He has also recorded and released music by Malian musicians Jah Youssouf and Bintou Coulibaly.

For this performance, he debuts a custom-built sequencer shaped by those accumulated experiences — an instrument that captures and mutates audio in real time, allowing structure and variation to emerge through live interaction.

Bongo Funhouse is a free-improvisation performance ensemble that explores the world of percussion and found sounds. Bongo Funhouse seeks to create a unique performance experience that blends elements of avant-garde and contemporary classical music. Taking influence from many types of music, literature, and nature, Bongo Funhouse travels through a wide variety of sound worlds and moods that at times will have your adrenaline pumping and at other times will have you drifting into an ambient trance. Having met at Indiana University through a shared interest in free improvisation, Bongo Funhouse is composed of Mitchell Beck, Stephen Karukas, and Paul Millette.

Based in Seattle, Mitchell Beck is an active performer, composer, and educator in the Pacific Northwest. He has performed internationally, had his works performed internationally, held the position of Visiting Assistant Professor of Percussion/Music Technology at Boise State University, and founded the Seattle Percussion Academy. Mitchell and Stephen are also co-founders of local percussion collective, Splinter Percussion.

Stephen Karukas is a percussionist and composer living in London, with interests in contemporary and improvised percussion. He also releases electronic music under his solo project, kmodp, as well as collaborations such as Traveling Boyfriend and Collected Works.

Paul Millette is a percussionist based in San Antonio, Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He maintains an active career as an orchestral percussionist, improviser, chamber musician, composer, and educator.

Miles Friday is a composer and sound artist who aims to rethink how we hear and listen, drawing on sound as a site for community-building, critical exchange, and play. He is based in San Antonio, Texas, where he teaches music technology at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Samantha Boshnack reprises her jazz song cycle Uncomfortable Subjects at the Chapel Performance Space. A chamber orchestra of Seattle music luminaries will perform the full cycle live before recording it at London Bridge Studio; the thirteen-piece ensemble, conducted by Joshua Kohl (Degenerate Art Ensemble), features vocals by Grammy-winning singer Johnaye Kendrick (säje).

In 2020, Boshnack invited artist and activist Natasha Marin and Pushcart-winning poet Jane Wong to join her in a series of correspondences about “Uncomfortable Subjects.” Over the ensuing pandemic years the three artists discussed racism, climate crisis, mental health, fascism, and the tensions of making art, finding hope, and staying connected amid social upheaval. Boshnack wove words and themes from these conversations and struggles into a suite of seven compositions, debuting them with a thirteen-piece chamber orchestra at the 2024 Earshot Jazz Festival (co-produced with Nonsequitur and Cornish Music Department).

Johnaye Kendrick (voice) • Joshua Kohl (conducting) • Alex Guy & Alina To (violin) • Heather Bentley (viola) • Erika Fiebig (cello) • Carlos Snaider (guitar/percussion) • Julian Weisman (bass) • Chris Credit (tenor saxophone/bass clarinet) • Sarah Bassingthwaighte (flute) • Bhavani Kotha (oboe) • Greg Campbell (percussion/french horn) • Samantha Boshnack (trumpet/compositions)

This project was supported in part by a grant from 4Culture. Commissioning funds for Uncomfortable Subjects also come from Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music and Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M³).

(photo: Lisa Hagen Glynn)

The University of Washington School of Music and the student-run Improvised Music Project (IMP) present IMPFest, featuring UW Jazz Studies students and faculty performing with renowned guest artists. The festival opens tonight at the Chapel with two student-led jazz and fusion ensembles:

Budapest, Cuongary is Henry Kelly, alto sax; Rohini Vrajmohan, trumpet; Alex Phelps, trombone; Rishabh McIntosh, trombone; Marko Vidich, guitar; Mira Santa Lucia, keyboard; AJ Marto, bass; Brayson Young, drums.

Riley Tobin Quintet is Riley Tobin, bass; Rory Somers, trumpet; Gus Scharler, tenor; Mira Santa Lucia, piano; Shane Ryan, drums.

Byron Westbrook presents a multichannel version of his acclaimed electroacoustic work, Translucents; Maria Thrän and Afroditi Psarra conduct real-time radio wave manipulations. 

Byron Westbrook
Translucents

First emerging from within New York’s experimental music scene nearly two decades ago and now based in Los Angeles, Byron Westbrook weaves intricate tapestries of sonority bridging the worlds of sound art, installation, avant-garde electronic music and synthesis. He works between immersive installation formats and music performance, utilizing a wide array of sound design, synthesis techniques and field recordings. Westbrook’s practice approaches sound in a structural way, where the architecture of a listening space becomes a key collaborator in his concerts. His work has been presented internationally at major institutions and festivals. Inspired by optical phenomena occurring while viewing the color panels of abstract painter Blinky Palermo, Translucents explores the concept of “audio after-image”. The work presents a series of audio scenes, with the intention of imprinting on the listener’s mind in order to influence the way each consecutive scene appears. It is a play with memory, presence, and with time, experimenting with dynamics between perceiving presence in the space where one is listening vs the perception of an external space or place. For this concert, Translucents is presented in an expanded immersive form that differs from its published release. “…his most mesmerizing album to date – a set of electroacoustic pieces that advances the rough blueprints laid out by legends like Maryanne Amacher, Bernard Parmegiani and Luc Ferrari…if you’re at all interested in electroacoustic music, ‘Translucents’ is just about as good as it gets.” – Boomkat

Maria Thrän and Afroditi Psarra
Live signals, live bodies (in conversation)

Through different embodied antenna systems — a swinging wire tuned to the electromagnetic field, and diy/handheld/wearable antennas — we receive and process transmissions at the Hertzian spectrum in real time. Our performance is a practice of co-tuning, interference, and spatial resonance; an improvisation with invisible fields — received through software-defined radios, and processed through live electronics and SuperCollider. Architecture, bodies, machines, and noise converge in a listening practice that resists control and invites uncertainty. 

Maria Thrän is a Berlin- and Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist, performer, and Ph.D. researcher in the University of Washington’s DXARTS program. Their immersive kinetic installations and performances integrate mechatronics, spatial sound synthesis, light, and video to explore rhythm, memory, and more-than-human communication. By transforming exhibition spaces into responsive perceptual systems, Thrän invites audiences to resonate with their own ecological entanglements and to consider how bodies, voices, and technologies can operate as instruments of memory, protest, care, and resistance. Their research-driven practice examines ecological interdependence, technological agency, and the poetics of signal and noise through speculative approaches to preservation. Thrän’s work has been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions and developed through residencies around the globe.

Afroditi Psarra’s research focuses on the interweaving of art and science through the creation of artifacts with a critical lens. She sees the praxis of crafting technological artifacts as an act of resistance against black box systems. One that contains embodied knowledge and carries with it oral histories of intergenerational practices. One that can transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries, and can be transmitted through direct engagement with materials. Likewise, she sees the use of electronics, open software and hardware, and the act of creating collectively as means of cultivating digital commons that have the potential to empower individuals through shared knowledge. She believes that the ability to craft your own technology is a powerful tool for world building, one that enables you to speculate about alternative presents and plausible futures.