Small Alien is a man and his machines making music. The solo project of local musician and music teacher, Paul Ehlen, Small Alien’s music explores the full range of sonic and emotional timbres offered by synthesizers and their kin. Small Alien employs all hardware electronic instruments to erect improvised soundscapes of both epic and delicate proportions. (You won’t see a laptop on stage)

Joining Small Alien for this special evening are a number of esteemed guests. Most important is visual artist and filmmaker, Greg McBrady, whose original videos have been dancing with Small Alien’s sounds for over 20 years. They are like Peanut Butter and Jelly, baby. Greg will be projecting an original film created to accompany Small Alien’s music as a full partner in the performance. Also joining Small Alien on stage will be local poet, Katy Ellis, reading from her deeply felt works about water and animals and people and plants. Her presence and words will duet with the music and will be a truly special gift to our audience. Two other secret special guest musicians will also be joining Small Alien for sections of the 2-hour set.

Come join us and be filled with a true audio and visual feast. A meal cooked up for the human spirit, sustenance for our tired hearts in these trying times. Doors 7 PM.

Please take care of the air we share: no artificial fragrances. Yoga mats or other personal seating apparatus welcome. Chairs and floor seating available.

Coming together to listen deeply; to move and to sound playfully, and to attend to a performance in tribute to beloved master musician and teacher, Stuart Dempster. (Please note that the celebration takes place over the course of several hours. No food or drink will be offered at the event, so please plan accordingly. Stuart requests that you bring no presents, just your presence!)

LISTENING TOGETHER (4 – 4:30 PM)
Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center (4th floor)

Deep Listening session with Brian Pertl and Leila Ramagopal Pertl

PLAYING TOGETHER (5 – 6 PM)
Picnic shelter in Meridian Park, directly behind/west of Good Shepherd Center (weather permitting; if not, we’ll meet in the Chapel) Please note, no amplified sound permitted in the Meridian Park area.

MERIDIAN EVENT for Stuart Dempster on his ninetieth birthday
(for best results, join us for Deep Listening in the Chapel before MERIDIAN EVENT!)

To celebrate Stu,
YOU ARE INVITED
To come together
To sing
To play
To dance
To listen
Spontaneously, improvisingly,

Or

Premeditatedly, composedly, choreographedly,
YOU ARE INVITED
In whatever mode you choose, to remember what he taught us:
YOU ARE INVITED
To always listen
To enjoy the silence
To play the silence
To leave space
To let your doing be transparent to what everyone else is doing
To direct your energy
To play with love
To listen deeply
To direct your energy and play with love towards a specific person or specific persons
To listen for the ending

TRANSITION (6:00 – 6:30 PM)
Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center (4th floor)

Video installation by Robert Campbell and ROOM. Please enter and exit as you wish, move about the space comfortably.

ATTENDING TOGETHER (6:30 – 7 PM)
Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center (4th floor)

Poem, “Gold and Oak” reading by Brian Komei Dempster

livingROOM, with original ROOM performers Sheri Cohen, Stuart Dempster, Renko Ishida Dempster, John Dixon and Tonya Lockyer, plus guests Loren Dempster, Neal Kosaly-Meyer, David Knott, Margaret Paek, and Steve Peters.

All are invited to linger following the performance to continue the celebration!

(photo: Danette Davis, courtesy of Earshot Jazz)

The Red Pants Collective, an improvised movement and sound project formed by father/daughter duo Giordana and James Falzone, are joined by movement artists Alia Swersky and Jadi Carboni (Graz, Austria), and sound artists Tom Baker, Heather Bentley, and Greg Campbell. 

Alia Swersky: movement
Giordana Falzone: movement
Jadi Carboni: movement
Tom Baker: guitar, theremin, electronics
Heather Bentley: viola and cello
James Falzone: clarinet, piano
Greg Campbell: drums, percussion, horns

Seattle Collaboration Society presents an evening of interdisciplinary free improvisation. The program begins with a 30-minute improvised performance featuring movement artist, choreographer, and educator Natalie Grant alongside jazz pianist, improviser, and Seattle Collaboration Society founder Jack Ramsey. Drawing on their distinct artistic practices, Grant and Ramsey will create a spontaneous dialogue between movement and sound in real time.

Following the performance, the space will open for a multidisciplinary improvisation session inviting musicians, dancers, painters, visual artists, and creatives of all backgrounds to participate. No prior improvisation experience is required—only a willingness to experiment, collaborate, and engage with fellow artists in a supportive, respectful, and open environment. Audience members who wish to remain for the open session are asked to participate actively rather than observe.

Doors open at 6:30.

Julie Slick is one of the most compelling bassists working today. Known for her wide array of unique tones and substantial melodic invention, she tours and records with the Adrian Belew Power Trio and her own bass duo-fronted band EchoTest, and has joined Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew’s Remain in Light project celebrating the music of Talking Heads. Her collaborators read like a “who’s who” of adventurous music: Les Claypool, Robert Fripp, Stewart Copeland, Victor Wooten, Danny Carey, and many more. This intimate Chapel setting is a rare chance to experience her up close.

Seattle’s Kitsune conjures unique progressive rock steeped in mysticism, odd meters, and cinematic texture, with electric violin, electronics, and fox masks in the mix. For this event they will be performing from their softer “Venus” repertoire.  Also opening the evening is Seattle guitarist Dave Webb, “guitar obsessed in the Pacific Northwest”, whose work spans the atmospheric indie rock of Moon Letters to more experimental terrain.

Bassist/vocalist Melanie Radford (Built to Spill, Blood Lemon) celebrates the release of her debut solo album For the Sake of Stillness, an inventive reimagining of lush ambient folk delivered with her singular touch. It was recorded during and in-between tours, coming together over a stretch of two years as a centering practice and statement of self. Constantly in motion from touring with Built to Spill, Melanie felt a deep need to make music that felt quiet, warm, grounded. She began collecting field recordings during her travels, going for long walks alone through cities, natural spaces, and neighborhoods. With these audio recordings as the foundation, Melanie built out melodies and rhythms, always keeping her bass and vocals at the heart of the music. For the Sake of Stillness is part meditation, part love poem, part hymn. The music is quiet, dreamy, steady and self-assured, propelled by melodic bass lines, musical minimalism, poetic lyricism, and Melanie’s powerful, haunting voice, which is the twin and complement to her bass. She will be playing with her band featuring Jim Roth (pedal steel), Lupe Flores (drums), and Lori Goldston (cello), with special projections and visuals tailored to the space.

Opener Sheridan Riley began playing drums at age eleven, inspired by the likes of Karen Carpenter, Led Zeppelin, the Jackson Five, ABBA, the Beatles, Deerhoof, Miles Davis, and Elvin Jones. After high school they played as often as they could, performing in contexts ranging from touring indie rock acts, country bar bands, and the Long Beach community college swing band. Since then, Riley has performed in the bands ALVVAYS, Dante Elephante, and Zen Mother, as well as a duo project with trumpeter Ahamefule Oluo called Insect Revenge, and a solo project called Peg. A frequent participant in the late, great improvisational series Racer Sessions, Riley has also collaborated with many Seattle artists including Lori Goldston, Wayne Horvitz, Haley Freedlund, Neil Welch, Cassandra Jenkins, Hand Habits, and Abbey Blackwell, among others.

Free jazz legend Scott Robinson makes a rare Seattle appearance to present a wide-ranging solo performance on a variety of instruments, including the seldom-heard C melody saxophone, featured on his unaccompanied album Solipsisms (2020). He will also engage with local phenom Neil Welch in a duo format.

Neil Welch opens with two works for solo saxophone, each of which will explore his deeply personal language on the instrument. Sonic areas of focus include the weaving of acoustically created multiphonic chord colors, singing through the instrument, air/wind sound, as well as melodies framed by standard and microtonal pitches. He’ll perform his 20-minute work, Puhpohwee, which has not been performed live since 2021. The word Puhpohwee translates from the Potawatomi Native American language as “the force which causes mushrooms to push up through the Earth overnight.” The work aims to sonically visualize the miracle of the mushroom’s emergence. This will be followed by a shorter, largely improvised work for the rarely-heard bass saxophone, pitched a full octave below the tenor.

Multi-instrumentalist/composer Scott Robinson has been a highly active presence on the New York-based creative music scene for more than 40 years, appearing on some 300 albums. Scott performs on both brass and reed instruments, and is equally at home with the traditional and the adventurous. A U.S. Jazz Ambassador and member of the Mingus Band for 30 years, he’s been heard on tenor sax with Buck Clayton, on alto clarinet with Paquito D’Rivera, on trumpet with Lionel Hampton, and on bass sax with the New York City Opera, as well as performances alongside a diverse roster of luminaries such as Anthony Braxton, Ruby Braff, Ella Fitzgerald, Clark Terry, Elton John, Bob Brookmeyer, Frank Wess, Chet Baker, Maria Schneider, and Roscoe Mitchell. As a composer, Scott has created large-scale multimedia works, solo performance pieces, jazz tunes and songs, and chamber pieces. In 2010, Scott formed ScienSonic Laboratories, a label releasing more than a dozen collaborative efforts with Roscoe Mitchell, Marshall Allen, Henry Grimes, Milford Graves, and many others. He is currently at work on his epic one-man improvised symphonic recording, Reach for Tomorrow. After nearly seven years of daily work, the first movement of fully-mixed music for more than 180 instruments is nearly finished. This project will take an estimated 12-15 years to complete.

Saxophonist Neil Welch is a Seattle-based improviser, acoustic and electronic artist, curator, composer, recording artist and educator. His practice is firmly linked to the natural world, welcoming inspiration from the abundant wildernesses of the Pacific Northwest. These influences are sonically reflected by a measured use of space and activated silence, with such specialized techniques as multiphonic-acoustic chord playing, microtonal pitch content, and air/wind-based sound. He is also a deep practitioner in the sculpting of a compelling melody, played on horn voices ranging from soprano to bass saxophone. He is a member of the acclaimed saxophone + electronics / drum duo Bad Luck, and Wayne Horvitz’s Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble. As a solo artist, Neil also particularly welcomes the emotive vulnerability of unamplified acoustic solo saxophone improvisation.

Curated by Haley Freedlund for Nonsequitur‘s NonSeq series.

Seattle cellist Lori Goldston joins eminent klezmer accordionist/scholar Christina Crowder for the latest installment of their ongoing collaboration, exploring traditional Eastern European Jewish repertoire in a way that welcomes the past into the present. For this iteration they will be joined by violinists Mae Kessler and Shulamit Kleinerman.

Lori Goldston plays written, traditional and spontaneous work on cello, and works as a composer and prolific, widely varied collaborator. Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, her voice as a cellist is singular, deeply textured and original, investigating thresholds, instability, and connections between far-flung modes of thought. She travels throughout the US and abroad, often working in artist-run spaces, with an eye toward being a bridge between places, ideas, and communities. Well known for her work touring with Nirvana and contributing to their “Unplugged in New York” album, she works with composers, film makers, writers, theater directors, choreographers, visual artists, orchestras, and bands including Earth, BBC Scottish Symphony, Black Belt Eagle Scout, Ya Tseen, Judith Hamann, Mirah, David Byrne, Jessika Kenney, Lonnie Holley, Jacobo Benassi, Trimpin, Stuart Dempster, Shelley Hirsch, Michael Hurley, Gwen Laster, Melanie Dyer, Laura Cannell, Charles Hayward, Embryo, Ilya Scheyveys, Jooklo, Ghedalia Tezartes, Senga Nengudi, Ellen Fullman, Lynn Shelton, Terry Riley, and many, many others.

Christina Crowder has been performing and researching Jewish music for thirty years, beginning in Budapest, Hungary in 1993 as a founding member of Di Naye Kapelye, and continuing with a Fulbright grant to Romania to document Jewish music in 1999, and since 2002 with an active research, teaching, and performing career in the US. She is Executive Director of the Klezmer Institute, which has been awarded three NEH Grants for Institute projects (2021-2025). Christina lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and performs with the Zamlers Trio. She also performs with Michael Winograd and the Honorable Mentschen, the Dave Levitt Klezmer Trio and many others. She has been a guest instructor in klezmer accordion and ensemble performance in the US, Canada, and Europe, and was both musical director and performer in the 2019 Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the 2020 ART Portland productions of the Broadway play “Indecent.” With the Klezmer Institute, Christina edited the Levitt Legacy music folio, is curating a player folio of KMDMP music, and has led KMDMP artist residency programs in Arizona, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, France, and Belgium.

An evening featuring the music of Philadelphia-based composer Christopher Burns and househusbands, his duo with composer/improviser Carlos Cotallo Solares. Percussionist Aaron Michael Butler will lead an ensemble of Seattle musicians in a performance of Burns’ composition “Quant Theseus” and play solo, followed by an improvised set by househusbands.

Christopher Burns is a composer, improviser, and music technologist. “Quant Theseus” is one of a series of pieces exploring forms of structured improvisation, originally written for Minor Vices, a Milwaukee-based ensemble Burns led from 2012-2016. The pieces in this line of work aim to establish a clear and distinctive compositional identities, emphasizing Burns’ interest in formal trajectories and multiple simultaneous layers of activity, even as they empower their performers to make genuinely improvised choices based on collective listening and creativity. “Quant Theseus” focuses on textural improvisation, using a labyrinthine flowchart as the means to both spur and constrain the performers’ sonic imagination.

househusbands create improvised electronic music: lucid explorations of rhythm, harmony, and sound. Christopher Burns plays custom software instruments, sculpting microtonal harmonies and subtly flickering drones. Carlos Cotallo Solares uses guitar-driven electronics, layering chiming chords, glitchy rhythms, and echoing squeals of noise. Together they create the domestic space of househusbands – sometimes ferocious and energetic, often hushed and intimate, always personal and distinctive.

Aaron Michael Butler is a percussionist, composer, and educator based in Seattle. His work often deals in static textures, repetition, durational stamina, resonance, and psychoacoustic effects.

Classical pianist and composer Thomas Abrahamson teams up with violinist Libby Phelps to perform original compositions in the style of contemporary classical. Harmonies and structures of all shapes and sizes coalesce into something familiar yet new. Is it classical? Is it Jazz? Is it a movie score? Or an amalgam of all that came before? Come be serenaded in the beautiful Chapel on a summer evening.