Presented by Zero-G Concerts.

Wally Shoup is a compelling and passionate alto saxophonist and veteran free improvisor, having been involved in playing and organizing since 1974. He is among a handful of Americans who have devoted themselves exclusively to the practice of free improvisation. An early explorer of the relationships between free jazz and noise, Shoup frequently collaborates with artists who similarly traverse the margins between categories. He has worked with many leading experimental musicians, including LaDonna Smith, Evan Parker, Thurston Moore, Nels Cline, Reuben Radding, and Chris Corsano. This rare solo performance is a singular opportunity to experience a master at work.

Seattle-based guitarist Bill Horist delivers an idiosyncratic and richly emotive take on the world’s most ubiquitous instrument. He has played on dozens of records and has performed throughout North and Central America, Europe and Japan; collaborating with numerous leading lights in a beguiling range of genres. Perhaps best known for his prepared guitar treatments, his work is widely regarded alongside masters like Fred Frith and Keith Rowe. He has cultivated a unique voice in a number of styles in the realms of, jazz, rock, folk, and experimental music. Horist is also becoming known as a masterful acoustic fingerstyle player in the tradition of Leo Kottke and John Fahey; additionally incorporating elements from Asia, India, the Middle-East and West Africa. He blends oblique improvisation with driving composition and his work reflects a more refined, dense and aggressive approach; very different but analogous to his innovative electric work. Bill has again forged a unique voice that pays respectful homage but also breaks steadfastly from this very established tradition.

Recently relocated to Seattle from Boston, where he was a mainstay of the improvised music community, Greg Kelley has performed throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Argentina & Mexico at numerous festivals, in clubs, outdoors, in living rooms, in a bank, and at least once on a vibrating floor. He has collaborated with a number of musicians across the globe performing experimental music, free jazz and noise, releasing a number of recordings in the process. He constantly seeks to push the boundaries of the trumpet and of “music.”

Headless Quartet – Eric Barber (tenor saxophone), Bob Rees (vibraphone), John Seman (double bass), Tom Zgonc (drums) – first convened at one of the weekly Monktail Spitehouse Tuesday night sessions. These padres of the Seattle free improv music community are joined by vanguard vibraphonist Rees for a powerhouse session of action and ecstasy.

A concert of Music on Music! The best way a composer can pay tribute, comment on, or criticize a piece is to write another piece of music in response. SMO will present three composers that have entered in dialogue with another work: Earle Brown’s Tracking Pierrot (1992), a tribute to Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, op. 21; UW faculty member Joël-François Durand’s Tombeau de Rameau II for solo piano (2013), a deformation/expansion of Rameau’s Pièces de Clavecin en Concerts, featuring pianist Cristina Valdes; and Franco Donatoni’s Tema, in which he pushes further a work of his own, Ruisseau dans l’escalier.

Luke Fitzpatrick performs a series of works for violin and electronics. The program features Mario Davidovsky’s Synchonisms No. 9 and Due Di Uno by Agostino Di Scipio with live electronics by Hector Bravo Benard. integrated spasms, a new work by Luke Fitzpatrick, will feature animation by Whitney Dopierak. Additionally, a world premier by Jeff Bowen will be presented. The program culminates with Luigi Nono’s enigmatic late work La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura with live electronics by Marcin Pączkowski.

The remarkably diverse and perpetually touring pianist Thollem McDonas lands at the Chapel for contrasting sets joined by two of Seattle’s finest percussionists, an electric piano set with Greg Campbell and an acoustic piano set with Paul Kikuchi.

“A fresh, disciplined avant-pianist with an attractively extreme viewpoint” (LA Weekly), Thollem McDonas is a peripatetic pianist/keyboardist, comproviser, singer-songwriter, educator, and social commentator. His musical compositions and performances range from post-classical, to free jazz, to noise to punk rock to… He has been touring perpetually throughout North America and Europe since 2006, performing solo works and collaborating with an array of musicians, dancers, and filmmakers. Added to this is his Keyngdrum series of improvised duos with a sprawling roster of drummers met along his perpetual touring schedule, with Thollem playing acoustic as well as electric.

Thollem was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. At the age of five, he began studying the keyboard repertoire from the medieval to the 20th century and studied with many notable teachers including Aiko Onishi and Lou Harrison. After graduating with degrees in piano performance and composition, he stepped from the concert pianist trajectory to dedicate his time to grassroots political movements and ecological restoration projects. He returned to music as his full focus in 2005, incorporating his myriad experiences into his compositions, improvisations and teaching. He has performed extensively as a soloist as well as in piano concertos with symphonies, West African drumming troupes, Javanese gamelan, punk bands, film makers, dancers, poets and painters, and a wide array of divergent musicians, both famous and under-known. He is the founding director of Estamos Ensemble, a Mexican-American cross border ensemble for musical exchange. In the past seven years, he has added 35 albums to his discography on 15 different vanguard labels. His music is diverse, with each album and every concert exploring a variety of approaches and paths, resulting in dramatically new and different outcomes.

Steve Barsotti & Dave Knott present an evening of subdued electro-acoustic music featuring sound transformed by spaces and materials.

Steve Barsotti is a Seattle based improviser, sound artist, instrument inventor and educator. His work explores notions of reduced listening through close examinations of easily bypassed sonic details; sounds that can only be heard through contact microphones and amplification or the sonic qualities of materials and objects found in everyday life. He invites the listener to forgo an attempt at literal connections with the sounds and to focus on the sounds in and of themselves. He is an original member of the Seattle Phonographers Union, a group of field recording-wielding improvisers. His two solo CDs, Along These Lines and Say “tin-tah-pee-mic”, contain improvisations with object recordings, location recordings, phonography, and electro-acoustic processing. His album with fellow instrument inventor Eric Leonardson, Rarebit, features improvisations on invented instruments. His work has been described as “quite cinematic and unsettling”, and as “ushering the listener across an ambient divide”.

David Knott is a Seattle music therapist, instrument maker, improviser and composer. He specializes in using improvisation to engage and facilitate therapeutic change with critically ill children. Since 1981, he has been playing and recording his own music solo and in collaboration with others. His interest in music and sound-making comes from a personal, intuitive response to vibration gleaned from early years spent exploring his grandfather’s junkyard, the process of building his guitar at the Roberto-Venn School in 1994, and every improvised musical experience. With instrument building, performances, workshops and recorded works, he seeks to stimulate the listener to a point of resonance and discovery of their own musical being. He is a founding member of animist orchestra – an ensemble that uses natural materials to create very quiet, subtly evolving soundscapes. He also performs and records with the graphic and text notation dedicated ensemble Eye Music as well as Omake & Johnson, Messenger Girls Trio and the Yes, Well…

After 15 years of concerts, Eric Barber‘s solo saxophone vocabulary continues to grow. For this show, he’ll be using loops and electronics to take full advantage of the ambiance of the Chapel.

Playing family ties, family tries, family flies and thighs, family fines and bribes and mimes and lines: Carmen Rothwell (bass), Mike Gebhart (drums) & Levi Gillis (sax) will be together and sing songs with each other. They will like the songs they are going to sing. They might even love the songs they are going sing. Come be in the room with us and share.

Composed, interpreted and recombined, Christian Pincock‘s original compositions for his quintet bring out the unique voices of the group’s members. These chamber compositions, which are both lyrical and energetic, integrate a variety of influences subtly and organically and feature improvisations and interactions between the players. They feature a written language of symbols which works together with standard notation to expand its descriptive and improvisatory capacity. Christian Pincock, valve trombone; Levi Gillis, tenor sax; Jon Hansen, tuba; Gus Carns, piano; Greg Campbell, drums. (photo: Daniel Sheehan/EyeShotJazz)

Monica Lopez Lau and Hector Bravo Benard present a program of music for recorders and electronics. The concert will include world premiere performances of two pieces written especially for Monica Lopez Lau – 32bit recorder songs (2013) by Matthias Kranebitter and Codex Alpha (2014) for sopranino recorder and live electronics by Hector Bravo Benard. Also on the program are solo recorder performances of Luciano Berio’s Gesti (1966), Giorgio Tedde’s Austro (1991) for amplified recorder, and a transcription for alto recorder of a Bach’s Partita BWV 1013, as well as a guest appearance by violinist Luke Fitzpatrick for the US premiere of Due di Uno (2002) by Italian composer Agostino Di Scipio.

Leviathan Worship Service believes in total freedom of sound. Comprised of Justin Justin James Taylord Taylor III (Keyboards), Mack the Knife (Live Action Lap-top), Mark Ostrowski (Drum Kit/Percussion), and Bloated Grim (Guitar and Theremin), we do not discuss what we are going to play, nor do we talk about whether past shows were “good” or “bad;” we are only concerned with what is happening in the moment. On this evening we will be preforming to two films with additional film and slide projections by Bloated Grim.

The evening will begin with a set by Nico Sophiea. Nico has lived in Seattle for the past two years, during which he has spent a great deal of his time working as a projectionist at the Egyptian Theater, Grand Illusion Cinema, Harvard Exit, and Northwest Film Forum. He has been an active participant in the Seattle band Time Eater as well as the Rocky Mountain Range. A Bay Area native, he was exposed to plentiful noise music and abstract drones, including a short stint in the cacophonous quadrangle, Grale, with MX-80 Sound members Bruce Anderson and Dale Sophiea (his father), as well as Gregory Hagan (Common Eider King Eider).

Voices Left: Experiments in Music for Computers, Instruments and Voices is an evening of computer music and ensemble works from Herbert Brün, Arun Chandra, Mark Sullivan, Susan Parenti, and their students accompanying a performance of Kenneth Gaburo‘s Maledetto.

Maledetto, a choral piece for seven speakers on the subject of the ‘screw’, with its many connotations. Gaburo explodes this single word into a world of activity: a darkly murmuring congregation, a cocktail party, a drunken gambler swearing up from the gutters, and the frantic screams of a football game. The words are split into phonemes and stretched into long hisses and gasps as the tempo presses, releases, presses and releases, again and again until every bit of meaning is pressed out. And then it begins again. All this is alongside a methodical, rational and exhaustively researched lecture on the history, technology, nomenclature, regulation and economy of the screw. The piece presents the attitudes of a society which screws, which is screwy, and which leaves many completely screwed over.

Accompanying Maledetto is a set of pieces for two-channel playback, quartets for guitars, violin, and cello, and Infraudibles for electronic sounds and instruments (one of the first compositions for live performers with recorded sounds). All of these works share a link to the music and teaching of composer Herbert Brün (1918 – 2000). An activist, teacher, composer and poet, Brün cared for and thus criticized the society of which he was a part. Our performances and compositions are based on the premise that the creation of a new society cannot come without a revolution in the arts.

Join us for an evening of music by the great late saxophonist Steve Lacy, performed by two quartets. One quartet is led by Tom Varner and Eric Barber, featuring John Seman on bass and Tom Zgonc on drums. The second quartet is lead by Kate Olson and Naomi Siegel. It will be a GREAT night of music.