Lockrem Johnson Centennial Celebration

This March our community celebrates the centenary of the legendary Seattle-based composer, pianist,
teacher, publisher, Guggenheim Fellow, and sometime steam calliopist, Lockrem Johnson (1924-1977)
with a recital featuring Keith Eisenbrey, piano, Susan Payne O’Brien, soprano, and Peter Nelson-King,
trumpet.

For those too young to remember, Lockrem’s presence in the local scene from the 1940s to the 70s cannot be overstated. He taught at both the University of Washington and Cornish, where he instituted the baccalaureate degree program, and was a pianist for the Seattle Symphony under Manuel Rosenthal. He penned what may be the first opera composed in Seattle – A Letter to Emily (1950) – which has been staged nearly 100 times in the United States and Europe, including a performance in Paris in early March of this year. Further information on Lockrem and his legacy, including scores and historical recordings, can be found here.

The recital will feature the world premiere of his Last Two Songs (1973) and the first performance of the
complete cycle of 24 Preludes (1967). Also on the program are his lively Sonatina for Trumpet and Piano (1950), Chaconne (1948), 2 Songs to a Child (1948), and the devestating Fifth Sonata (1953) which Keith will perform from the score given to him by Lockrem himself just a few months before his untimely passing.

Kaley Lane Eaton

Avante-garde classical composer, freak-folk singer-songwriter and postmodern jazz interloper Kaley Lane Eaton performs her sophomore album, Lookout, live with an all-star orchestra of Seattle’s most beloved genre-bending musicians.

For artists like Kaley Lane Eaton who paint outside the lines, there are seemingly endless boxes to check, but few name-brand comparisons. Joni Mitchell, Björk, Kate Bush, Laurie Anderson. 

On her latest album Lookout, Eaton regularly makes pressure-testing trips from the vast cosmos down to the particular details of home in the Pacific Northwest. In her words, “It’s a behemoth.” From the ever-expanding space of jazz cymbals, flute, and harp, down to the folksy pluck of her banjo — a prized recent acquisition — and the grounding chords of her great-great-great grandmother’s piano, which shipped up the Missouri River to the family homestead in Montana. 

There are no electronic instruments to be found here, but many trees. The sequoia on the hillside, aspens quaking, cedar, and Jeffrey pine.

With her experience in electronic music, Eaton’s choice to exclude digital instruments from the palette is immediately felt. It’s not that technology doesn’t exist here. It’s a conscious focus on human beings with time-tested tools. Ancient technology.

Eaton composes with the full command of her four music degrees and classical training, but there’s an American-ness that can’t be shaken on Lookout. A sorrow, wildness, and expansiveness, not of the European classical tradition, but of jazz, blues and folk. Kaley Lane Eaton is all of these things and more. And none of them precisely.

Eaton (on vocals, banjo, and piano), is joined on this live performance of Lookout by Chris Icasiano (drums), Kayce Guthmiller (voice and viola), Moe Weisner (bass), Samantha Boshnack (trumpet), Heather Bentley (viola), Leanna Keith (flute), Neil Welch (saxophone), Rian Souleles (guitar, bouzouki, and baglama), Lily Press (harp), Simon Linn-Gerstein (cello), Alina To (violin), Maria Scherer-Wilson (cello), and Aleida Gehrels (viola), Ray Larsen (trumpet).

Seattle Guitar Orchestra

The Seattle Guitar Orchestra expands the live concert experience with solo, orchestral, and cinematic presentations of the music of close collaborations with composers from the Ukraine, Nigeria, Kenya and more. This concert blends the intimacy of live performance with the spectacular cinematography of the movies. Come experience and evening of solo guitar, guitar orchestra, and the best in music movie making as we celebrate the work of Ukrainian composer Oleg Boyko, a composer from whom Seattle Guitar Orchestra has commissioned The Secret Life Of Trees

The Seattle Guitar Orchestra stands in solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

Jonah Parzen-Johnson + Kelsey Mines + Welch/Blackwell/Campbell

Jonah Parzen-Johnson makes music for baritone saxophone & flute that challenges listeners with experimental textures & forms while embracing them with warm approachable melodies. A Chicago native and longtime Brooklyn resident, Jonah has performed solo in more than a dozen countries across four continents. You might find him at jazz festivals in Berlin, Helsinki and Seattle, concert halls in Istanbul and Bruges, rock clubs in Rotterdam, Montreal and Rome, or jazz clubs in New York and Chicago. His solo performances are a deeply intimate experience, as he endeavors to share who he is, how he sees our world, and the temporary moments of community that we can all embrace together.

Bassist Kelsey Mines resides in Seattle, performing and teaching while touring nationally and internationally with groups including ings, NYGASP, and the Hollywood Concert Orchestra. Kelsey currently works for the Yakima Symphony, Symphony Tacoma and the Paramount Orchestra, while freelancing in numerous settings reaching from chamber music to Latin jazz. She released her debut album in 2018 February of entirely original music and currently co-leads the bands EarthToneSkyTone and Here to Play. Kelsey was the recipient of Earshot Jazz’s Emerging Artist Award in 2019 and continually creates inspired work as a solo artist and collaborator.

Saxophonist Neil Welch is a Seattle-based acoustic and electronic artist. Drawing artistic guidance from the abundant wildernesses of the Pacific Northwest, his sonic formations, whether prepared composition or purely improvised, are all firmly linked to the natural world. Neil’s recorded works span contemporary and avant-garde jazz, modern classical, soundpainting, solo acoustic saxophone, electronic sound processing, indie rock, and other current musical forms. Tonight he brings a trio featuring Abbey Blackwell on bass and Greg Campbell on drums/percussion/horn. The ensemble will interpret several of Welch’s most recent original compositions, including works with more fiery free-music stylings, microtonal improvisation, multiphonics, and intervallic melodies that span well beyond the expected range of the saxophone. 

NonSeq: Evicshen + Reylinn

Victoria Shen (aka Evicshen) is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco. Shen’s sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Her multimedia practice extends beyond musical composition and performance to include installation and non-traditional methods of distribution. Her personal identity, her body, is the space her work utilizes to restructure sonic meaning. In her live performances, she proposes an exploration between meaning and non-meaning through the physical activation of noise tropes. Her probing into these melodic voids interrogate the ways we perceive value within aural experiences. The appendage-like instruments and objects she makes, exemplify Shen’s ability to embody through sound her interest in the tension created by opposition: control and chaos, the unique and the mass produced, the practical and the absurd.

Reylinn is a Vancouver-based audio/visual artist, DJ, and radio host. They’re a founding member of Acceleration Radio, an open format FM radio, live stream and events collective with a focus on audio/visual experimentation. Attracted to the contrasting aesthetics of the natural and synthetic, their live performances recontextualize audio and video recordings captured in daily life for spaces of catharsis. Tonight Reylinn presents an audio/visual piece performed live through Ableton and Resolume. The base material consists of field recordings and videos taken in daily life and during travels over the past year, heavily distorted and experimented with for an immersive experience. 

Curated for Nonsequitur’s NonSeq series by Connie Fu.

Nadah El Shazly + Serious Dreams

Presented by the Vera Project. Doors open 7 PM.

Nadah El Shazly is a producer, vocalist and sound artist from Cairo, Egypt. Her music combines expressive 19th century musical concepts from her homeland with contemporary, borderless forays into electronic and improvisational idioms. She has toured the world extensively, featuring at festivals including Le Guess Who?, REWIRE, Irtijal, and FIMAV, among many others. Her debut album, Ahwar, landed at #12 on The Wire’s ‘Best Albums of 2017’. Beyond her own music, El Shazly is an inspired collaborator, working closely with like-minded Egyptian musicians Maurice Louca and Sam Shalabi (Land of Kush). Recently, she’s been making brain-scrambling, beat-driven music as Pollution Opera, a newly minted duo with irreverent Welsh sound artist Elvin Brandhi. El Shazly has also spent time on-screen, starring in the feature length film About Her (2020) and appearing in the Netflix original series Love, Life & Everything In Between (2022). Currently, she is wrapping production on a pair of film scores and preparing to release her sophomore album, due in spring of 2024.

Seattle artists Natasha El-Sergany and Josh Medina of somesurprises perform music from their new serious dreams project.

Xyloboyz: Music for Bass Drums

The Xyloboyz (Aaron Michael Butler and Jonathan Rodriguez) present: MUSIC FOR BASS DRUMS

This program will include classic works like John Zorn’s Dark River and Gerard Grisey’s Stèle for bass drum duo, as well as newly composed works featuring guest musicians by the duo. 

Of Pillars (featuring Casey Adams), Jonathan Rodriguez writes: 

“In the intricate dance of familial symbolism, este enigmático cornerstone of lineage stands veiled, su esencia obscured by el shroud of convolución temporal. Whispers of ancestry waltz dentro de los labyrinthine corridors of obfuscated epochs, no dimes nor energy ¿can el clandestine pilar of kinship be deciphered? Un cipher entwined con los echoes de ancestral murmurs, concealing los riddles of enigma familial. Diamond drear.

Fiddle/synth droners Glum Reaper will open the show.

Please join us for an evening of immersive, deep, and meditative experimentalism. Listeners are encouraged to bring yoga mats, blankets, etc. to enjoy the evening if they wish. 

Uncharted Duo

Uncharted Duo is a percussion and trumpet collaboration pushing the limits of contemporary music through a synergy of avant-garde, jazz, electroacoustic, and new music styling. Percussionist and composer Mitchell Beck employs the full range of percussion instruments spanning styles from old to undiscovered, while trumpeter Derek Ganong utilizes a dazzling array of classical and jazz virtuoso techniques to create a marvel of collaborative music. The audience will experience the full range of musical styles, timbres, genres, and moods throughout the event as Beck and Ganong venture into uncharted territory for both jazz and contemporary music collaborations.

Sid Samberg

(Note: This concert was rescheduled from the original date of Jan. 12.)

Sid Samberg, a composer-pianist from Chicago, is honored to participate in the Wayward Music Series a second time, exactly one year after the last, which was his Seattle debut. He will perform more original works for piano solo, which explore concepts ranging from the personal (meditations on dreams and close relationships) to the global (referencing the climate crisis and our changing environment).

Sid Samberg (b. 1989) is a composer-pianist, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and educator. His music flows from an inner voice which connects the emotional content of sound with deeply felt aspects of human experience. He has been described as “uncommonly talented” (John Von Rhein – Chicago Tribune).

Samberg has been called an “eco-pianist” as a result of his musical engagement with climate change. Several of his works are inspired by (or pay tribute to) our relationship with nature.

His recent collaborations include Zero Tolerance, a collaborative project with C. Eule Dance Company about a mother and daughter separated by ICE at the US-Mexico border; the release of LUDO, an EP recording of a modular graphic score written for him by composer Drew Corey, a special “Schubertiade” concert with soprano Natalie Ingrisano, and a performance on piano and keyboards with the NYC experimental black metal band Liturgy in their opera Origin of the Alimonies, at REDCAT in LA. Samberg has a degree in composition from California Institute of the Arts.

NonSeq Curators Concert

Nonsequitur kicks off the 2024 NonSeq concert series with a special performance introducing this year’s curatorial team:

Beth Fleenor is an electric, adrenaline inducing performer crafting moments that ricochet between meditation and a full body purge. Whether performing solo with amplified clarinet, voice & electronics, leading blindfolded chamber ensembles, conducting a full theater house as a beat-boxing choir, or singing in her own invented language as Crystal Beth, her work is grounded in the idea that “art is the discipline of being.”

enereph is a persona of multidisciplinary artist Connie Fu (b. 1992). Her atmospheric, percussive, and labyrinthine compositions have been presented live, on radio, and as recorded releases by Acceleration Radio, Vancouver (2023), Ground Hum, Seattle (2023), ANTiPODE, Seattle (2023), Active Passive Performance Society, Galiano Island (2023), OneBeat (2022), and Heterodox Records, Portland (2021). Tonight she will play a set from computer, synth, and sampler accompanied by a video composition.

Kole Galbraith is an interdisciplinary artist and noise musician. He has collaborated with various artists including Lori Goldston, Greg Kelley, Chloe Alexandra Thompson, morher, Cigve, Jason Lazer, Patrick Wurzwallner, Warren Realrider, and Sean Waple. Kole is also a co-director of local experimental label Obscure & Terrible, and is an enrolled member of the Peoria Tribes of Indians in Oklahoma. Tonight he will be presenting an electro-acoustic piece that focuses on Sinixt/Interior Salish concepts of the Coyote and prehistoric identity practices.  

Born in Iran, classical guitarist Naeim Rahmani immigrated to the United States as a refugee and has since made a name for himself as an accomplished performer, both nationally and internationally. His talent and dedication to his craft have earned him numerous accolades, including a 2022 Goethe-Institut Residency Award, and a 2023 CityArtist Award from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. Naeim is also the artistic director of the Seattle-Isfahan Project (SIP), which brings together musicians from Seattle and Iran to create a shared workspace where performers and composers come together to create new works for the guitar repertoire. The forthcoming installment, “Displaced Voices,” sponsored by the Seattle Symphony, is scheduled to premiere in the fall of 2024. Tonight Naeim will play a set of solo guitar pieces in which composers have explored the extensive percussion palette of the instrument. These elements, playing alongside the fingerboard, and tapping on the fretboard with both hands, bring a novel dimension to the sound of guitar music.