An evening of music and discussion with Seattle composers:

Jay Hamilton
Jeremiah Lawson
Susan Maughlin Wood
S. Eric Scribner

The Seattle Composers’ Salon fosters the development, performance and appreciation of new music by regional composers and performers. At bi-monthly, informal presentations, the Salon features finished works, previews, and works in progress. Composers, performers, and audience members gather in a casual setting that allows for experimentation and discussion. Everyone is welcome!

Earshot’s Jazz: The 2nd Century program invites Seattle musicians to creatively consider the future of jazz, in any and all of its possibilities. Curated each year by a different “blind jury” from responses to a general call for submissions, the resulting concert series showcases original compositions by Seattle artists on four consecutive Thursday evenings in July.

Inversion Therapy
Inversion Therapy is a group of four Seattle-based improvisers with a long history of collaboration. On saxophone are two Seattle natives: Stuart MacDonald, an active performer and teacher throughout the Pacific Northwest, and Mark Taylor, one of the most in-demand saxophonists in the region. Pianist Dawn Clement, 2015 Northwest Instrumentalist of the Year, and bassist Chris Symer are both frequent performers on the Seattle jazz scene.

Through their music they explore the meaning of family, friendship, and the artist’s place in society in the Second Century of jazz. Their music is an expression of collective feelings and experiences, engaging the listener on an emotional level. It is almost entirely improvised, without any written material. The result is a program of freely improvised miniatures, each with their own encapsulated musical ideas relating to the work as a whole.

Gregg Belisle- Chi
Since participating in the 2014 Second Century series, winning a 2015 Golden Ear Award for his debut album Tenebrae, and recently earning his Masters from the UW School of Music, guitarist/composer Gregg Belisle- Chi has become one of the most exciting young musicians in the region. His latest project, entitled “I Sang to You and the Moon,” is a song cycle of six poems by the American poet Carl Sandburg, and features Chelsea Crabtree on vocals, Ray Larsen on trumpet, and Chris Symer on bass. This project is Belisle- Chi’s attempt to demonstrate the intrinsic relationship between music and lyric.

“It was my intention to write a set of music in line with the art song tradition, where poetry and improvised music intersect and collaborate, yet mutually stand on their own,” he says.

Inverted Space Ensemble concludes its 2015-2016 season with the music of Georges Aperghis and Iannis Xenakis. Featured on the program is Xenakis’ XAS for saxophone quartet and Aperghis’ Jeu à quatre for alto saxophone quartet. Dikhthas for violin and piano and Morsima-Amorsima for violin, cello, double bass and piano, both by Xenakis, are also included.

WIND TALKERS is an innovative music duo comprised of veteran singers and multi-instrumentalists Amy Denio and Emily Hay. They have been collaborating as improvisers and co-conspirators at venues and festivals since 2010. The original Windtalkers were the Navajo code signalers recruited by the US during World War II to send secret messages encrypted in the Navajo language which the enemy could not decipher.

Hay sings, plays flute, bass flute, and works with electronics. Denio sings, plays alto sax and clarinet, and works with electronics. Both have musical histories and reputations as powerful musicians whose works cross boundaries artistically and geographically. Together they create a deep and empathetic musical synergy, not often found in the male-dominated world of improvised music. Their innovative collaborative efforts elicit virtuosity and humor, combined with gorgeous melodic and harmonic themes.

Emily Hay is an active member of the Los Angeles and ‘Left Coast’ experimental and improvised music scenes, having performed and recorded with groups such as Hay Fever, U Totem, Polarity Taskmasters, Adam Rudolph’s Go: Organic Orchestra, the Vinnie Golia Large Ensemble, Mooncake, Jeff Kaiser’s Okodektet and many others. With record releases on Cuneiform Records, Recommended Records, Meta Records, Public Eyesore and a host of other labels, she has performed and toured throughout North America and Europe.

Inducted into Seattle’s Jazz Hall of Fame in 2015, Amy Denio is a prolific composer, improviser and record producer based in Seattle. Founder of groups such as The Tone Dogs, the Tiptons Sax Quartet, The Danubians and Ama Trio, she has been playing festivals and creating multi-media spectacles for over 25 years in North America, throughout Europe, Turkey and Russia, in Taiwan, Japan, India and South America. She has produced over 45 recordings for Knitting Factory, ReR Megacorp, RecRec, Cuneiform, and her own record label, Spoot Music.

impacttestdummy members Gregor Visconty and Mike Todd formed in 1987 in Olympia, WA. In a nod to the first piece they recorded which utilized the use of tape loops, using five 1/4″ reel to reel tape machines and pre-recorded tape loops impacttestdummy will remix a recording of The QT, a duo from Santa Fe. Accompanying on drums are Mark and Cami Hanna.

PRISONFOOD delves deep into the sonic abyss, utilizing fresh loops and spicy effects to create lush atmospheric dishes that can satisfy an ever expanding palate. This culinary master doesn’t always stick to the recipe book, for when you’re cooking in someone else’s kitchen, you might need to improvise. Abraham Moses, the driving impetus of the project is usually avoiding the lime-light, working diligently behind the scenes with local Seattle off-kilter entity, Pent Up Release, to fruition hot pockets of controlled chaos.

Noisegasm is Brad Anderson (keyboards, computer) and Greg Weber (guitar, electronics.) They play electronic tone poems based on long forgotten mythologies and auditory hallucinations. With influences ranging from Eno to Shostakovich and from Philip Glass to Blue Cheer they both soothe and alarm the listener with long ambient drones, skittering electronic noises, classical cadences and all-out aural bombast.

Samuel A. Crome debuts Delicate Air, a long form piece for prepared electric guitar, alto sax, bells and radio. Mr. Crome is an American composer and performer of low-profile sound and performance arts, with an underground music history stemming back some 35 years. He will begin to release an extensive series of limited edition 30-minute cassettes in late 2016, both solo tapes and duo collaborations with Work/Death, Snack Bastards, Sycamorons, Nick Forte, and Leif Goldberg.

Greg Kelley began studying the trumpet at age 10. He attended the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, where in addition to studying the Conservatory curriculum, he also immersed himself in a deep study of avant-garde and experimental music, eventually coming to the conclusion that his musical focus fell outside of the academic sphere. After his studies, Kelley moved back to his native Massachusetts, quickly insinuated himself into the local avant-garde circles and soon commenced a period of intense travel and collaboration, bringing him throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Argentina & Mexico. In 2014, he relocated to Seattle. He has appeared on over 80 recordings and plays in a number of long running groups including Nmperign (with Bhob Rainey), the BSC and Heathen Shame (with Wayne Rogers & Kate Village of Major Stars). Other collaborators have included Jandek, Keiji Haino, Donald Miller (Borbetomagus), Anthony Braxton, Kevin Drumm, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, Joe McPhee and Lionel Marchetti. In addition to playing the trumpet, Kelley has also recorded using electronics and musique concrete elements, sometimes utilizing trumpet-based sound sources, other times not.

Cameron Shafii is a San Francisco-based composer practicing generative and systems music. His compositions are inflected by software processes involving spectral analysis, convolution, recombination file handling, and stochastic elements. His works do not impose upon the listener any temporal scheme – ‘engagement/disengagement’ in Greimassian terms – refusing to form what we call a narrative tension. But his music has kinetic movements and climaxes; a functional exploration of sounds that range from microscopic and minimal, to macro and maximal. Shafii has remixed and reprocessed works by CoH, Dalglish and Sote. Currently, he is working in collaboration with Japanese sound artists Kozo Inada and Christophe Charles for a forthcoming 2xLP titled i[] . He runs the label Ge-stell.

DJ Degenerate provides the exquisite sonic ambiance between sets.

Bay Area band Grex visits Seattle for a special evening of sounds both familiar and strange, joined by local free jazz trio Citizens Band. Grex has been called “essential current-and-future listening,” offering a unique blend of popular song, free improvisation, and experimental jazz. The group’s sensitive but deeply dynamic music has drawn comparisons to Jimi Hendrix, Sonny Sharrrock, and Skeleton Crew. Grex has participated in performances with the likes of Fred Frith, Tony Levin, and the Kronos Quartet, and has presented at festivals nationwide, including the Switchboard Music Festival (SF), Sonic Circuits Festival (DC), and the United States of Asian America Festival (SF).

Citizens Band is a Seattle-based trio comprised of Ivan Arteaga, Chris Icasiano, and Jeff Johnson, a multi-generational project focused on original jazz with plenty of room for improvisation and spontaneity.

CONCERT III – DISCRETE INFINITY

Concert at 8 PM
PRE-CONCERT TALK AT 7:30 PM
with guest composer Anthony Cheung & SMO co-Artistic Director Jérémy Jolley

For its season finale, Seattle Modern Orchestra will host composer and Rome Prize winner Anthony Cheung in residency for the US Premiere of his 2011 piece, Discrete Infinity. The piece, borrowing its title from Noam Chomsky’s The Architecture of Language, explores the limitless possibilities of expression with a finite material such as language. Also on the program will be a classic of Spectralism, Gérard Grisey’s Periodes, and a little-known work by Canadian composer Claude Vivier titled Samarkand, in which he continues to work with melodies while exploring harmonies built on Spectralist thinking.

Violinist Luke Fitzpatrick presents a solo violin and electronics concert. Works include Anthèmes 2 by Pierre Boulez and Frises by Kaija Saariaho. The concert will also feature newly commissioned works by Doug Niemela, Jacob Sundstrom, Ania Stachurska and Jeff Bowen.

Black Anemones is a unique chamber recital featuring individualist masterworks by Schwantner, Fine, Schulhoff and others performed by the new ensemble Cursive (Samantha Bosch, flute and Peter Nelson-King, multi-instrumentalist/founder). Cursive focuses on performing an eclectic mix of great, unknown modern works performed with a modular ensemble.