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.

The Winds of Change Duo, consisting of Bobby Collins (horn) and Cassie Fry (piano), brings you into the music making through a fun and relaxed atmosphere and informative introductions. They perform all works by composers from underrepresented communities, delighting audiences around Washington State and introducing unique and rarely heard gems for horn and piano.

“Worlds Collide” was recently recorded and will be released as an album this Spring. It features pieces for horn and piano from BIPOC composers ranging from avant-garde to simply beautiful, and from solemn to playful. Our performance will also feature two arias, sung by Bobby.

Program: 

“La Fritanga (The Barbeque)” – Victor Agudelo
“Evening Reveries” – Usamah Mustafa
“Blobfish’s Dream” – Ming-Hsiu Yen
“Celdas” – Darwin Aquino

“Toreador Song” from Carmen – George Bizet
“I am the very model of a modern Major General” from Pirates of Penzance – Gilbert and Sullivan

“Golden Hour” – Cait Nishimura
“Boatman’s Work Song of the Li River” – Daixuan Ai (World Premiere)
“The Photo Wall” – Green Seo (World Premiere)
“Dos Canciones para Corno Francés” – Fulvio Villalobos

The Force of Listening #5 presents six sonic and visual works presented by artists from across the US and Mexico to create an evening of experimental ambience, music, and sound art coming on the heels of this year’s Campbient session, organized by REALMOREREAL. Artists include Lisa Ann Schonberg (Brookyln, NY), NINA NINA (Veracruz, Mexico), Mary Edwards  (Brooklyn, NY), Kafele Williams (Omaha, Nebraska), Theo Krantz Santa Fe, NM), Jenn Howd (Cincinnati, OH), Amber Cortes (Seattle, WA) and Julia Edith Rigby (Santa Ana, CA).

Rory Somers is a Seattle-based trumpeter, composer, and improviser working in jazz and improvised music. He is joined by drummer Ethan Horn, guitarist Cole McKittrick, and saxophonist Coen Rios for an evening of original compositions and collective improvisations. 

Coming through the UW Improvised music program together, the four have explored wide ranges of music-making, from acoustic chamber jazz to electronically affected improvisations. 

QUIET TIME is an immersive live experience by Kassa Overall and Corey King, inspired by the Chapel at Good Shepherd Center. The idea traces back to a familiar childhood moment: long car rides, restless energy in the back seat, and a parent finally calling, “OK… quiet time.” Following the unexpected power outage during Overall’s 2025 Earshot Jazz Festival set at Hidden Hall, which transformed the room into a raw, acoustic listening experience, QUIET TIME expands on that moment of stillness. The performance features acoustic instrumentation, minimal sound reinforcement, and reduced lighting to create an intimate and focused sonic environment. Complete silence is requested throughout the performance, aside from natural moments of response such as applause and crowd participation. Upon entry, guests will receive sealed pouches for their phones.

Kassa Overall is a Grammy-nominated jazz artist, drummer, emcee, singer and producer. He seamlessly blends jazz, hip-hop and avant-garde experimentation into a sound uniquely his own. His music is both innovative and accessible, pushing the boundaries of genre while remaining deeply engaging. 

A graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Overall has been a driving force in the jazz world for over two decades. A child drum prodigy from Seattle, he taught himself to make beats on an MPC and an ASR 10 acquired by his father at a police auction. Mentored by Wallace Roney and Billy Hart, he has toured and recorded with renowned artists like Geri Allen, Jon Batiste, Steve Coleman, Vijay Iyer, Bilal, Yoko Ono, Terri Lyne Carrington, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Sullivan Fortner and Gary Bartz. His production work can be heard on albums by Theo Croker, Arto Lindsay, Lakecia Benjamin and Danny Brown. In 2020, he was called “one of modern jazz music’s most audacious futurists” by Pitchfork. He is a 2025 recipient of the Doris Duke Foundation Prize.

Overall has released six critically acclaimed mixtapes and albums, including I Think I’m Good and Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz. On CREAM, his most recent solo studio album, Kassa Overall pays homage to the twin passions of his youth — hip-hop and jazz drums in the tradition of Elvin Jones. With this collection of instrumentals, the visionary drummer and producer transforms beloved songs from the 90s and aughts into timeless standards that are rhythmically adventurous, witty, and often sublime.

Corey D. King is an acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, producer, and composer whose extraordinary talent has resonated globally. With a Grammy win in 2021 for co-producing and writing on Esperanza Spalding’s groundbreaking album, “Songwrights Apothecary Lab,” King has firmly established himself as a creative force in the industry. Having shared the stage and studio with iconic figures such as Milton Nascimento, Gil Scott-Heron, Bonobo, Dr. Lonnie Smith, DJ Premier, Glen Hansard, Mos Def, Bilal, and Takuya Kuroda, King boasts an impressive musical portfolio. Currently touring with the legendary Iggy Pop, his versatile skills have left an indelible mark on the world of music.

Based in the vibrant musical scenes of Berlin and Seattle, King’s solo ventures include the critically acclaimed albums Lashes and A Loveless Sunken Sun, which garnered widespread recognition from influential publications like Hypebeast, Afro-Punk, Earmilk, Complex UK, and Bonafide. These albums showcase the depth of King’s artistry, blending songwriting, captivating vocals, and masterful instrumental performances.

Curated by Cuong Vu for Nonsequitur‘s NonSeq series.