Pete Leinonen solo + quartet

Jailbreak…the one with 32 bars.

Solo double bass by composer/bandleader Pete Leinonen.

A spontaneously improvised long form composition using elements and fragments from various original compositions and jazz standards as thematic material to be developed in the course of the performance.

Following his solo set, Pete will be joined by long-time associates Wally Shoup on saxophone and Jim Knodle on trumpet plus Greg Campbell, drums and percussion. They will create an unrehearsed “free jazz” set in which anything might happen. No plan. No rules. This will be the very first performance by this ensemble of well known and loved improvisors. Says Pete: “I’ve performed extensively with all of them individually in various settings going back as far as the early 80s. I’m looking forward to improvising, the four of us together for the first time, on this special night.”

Seattle born, Pete Leinonen played his first professional gigs here in 1955 at age 13. Starting with a long run at Seattle’s Llahngaelhyn Coffee House in the 1960’s, he has been a full-time working member of the jazz community, as a freelance bassist, touring sideman, composer/arranger and studio musician and for the last 40 years has led successful working jazz bands throughout Seattle and the greater Northwest. Locals know that he has always had a foothold in the free improvisation world too, and that’s what Jailbreak is about. No rules, except make beautiful new music and share those creative moments and discoveries with you. Pete calls it “unofficial music”.

(photo: Stewart Tilger)

Mosaic Art Ensemble

The musicians, actors, and dancers of the Mosaic Art Ensemble seek to balance individuality and community in their collaborative art. Works such as Mosaic II, III, IV, and V pair various ensembles together to simultaneously perform solos developed independently, then assembled into a cohesive whole. Unintended associations are inevitably made when these independent compositions are organized through a rehearsal process and molded into a single piece. However, the individual voice of each performer is preserved and presented at the final event.

The pieces provide a platform for each artist to deliver their own message. Simultaneously they create a space for cooperation, a fundamental trait in both the ensemble’s work and any functioning community. Each piece the ensemble performs investigates how a communal objective can be achieved without the sacrifice of individual voices and identities.

Performing composite works of individual solos reflects the art of mosaic, in which small pieces are combined to create a larger and greater image. This ensemble was inspired by Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell, in Barcelona, Spain, which features large-scale mosaics. These mosaics are composed of contrasting patterns and are built from pieces that come from various and differing sources. Nevertheless, the mosaics communicate effectively and are experienced as a cohesive work. Similarly, the Mosaic Art Ensemble performs works of composite performance in the manner of the mosaic, in that what began as individual pieces now constitute a greater communal expression..

The cast will include Liam Hardison, Madilyn Cooper, Payten Redwood, Elijah Luce Baraceros, Karyn Tobin, Brooke Morrison, and Maeve Haselton. Taya Pine will design and build the costumes for the performers, and Kate O’day will provide lighting. The process involves the composition of a fixed-media piece of music for each Mosaic, which are then sent to the individual artists to compose their own solos. Three rehearsals in addition to the dress rehearsal will be allotted to realize the greater works with all cast members present, providing an opportunity for the ensemble to cultivate a more cohesive quality between their solos.

SIMF: Odeya Nini + Blackwell/Mines duo

Originally booked as part of the 34th Seattle Improvised Music Festival in February, which was rescheduled due to snow.

Odeya Nini is a Los Angeles-based experimental vocalist and composer with work spanning solo voice to chamber music and collages of musique concrète. As a vocalist she is devoted to redefining vocal interpretation and song through an exploration of extended vocal techniques, and how they resonate with the physical body’s language and space.

The duo of contrabassists Abbey Blackwell and Kelsey Mines will play the opening set. Abbey and Kelsey have crossed paths many times in the jazz, improvised, and classical music scenes in Seattle by way of the University of Washington and the Racer Sessions and are excited to play together as a duo.

NOTE: Odeya Nini will also do a Voice and Singing Bowl Sound Bath at the Seattle Sound Temple on Wednesday, Nov. 13 at 7:30 PM. Info and reservations here.

Yann Novak + Robert Crouch + Ian Wellman

Los Angeles artists Yann Novak, Robert Crouch and Ian Wellman visit Seattle on the first stop of their west coast tour. Yann Novak will present his new work Slowly Dismantling, reflecting on his formative experiences as a queer youth in middle America and explores these acoustic and social spaces as zones of liberation. Robert Crouch will perform new work inspired by poet Ted Berrigan, that explores the tensions between collective listening and personal reflection. Ian Wellman will be performing segments from his latest offering, Bioaccumulation, and new material comprised of recordings made around Southern California, Sierra Nevada, and Lake Azeui, Haiti.

Yann Novak is a queer interdisciplinary artist and composer based in Los Angeles. His work is guided by his interests in perception, context, movement, and the felt presence of direct experience. Through the use of sound and light, Novak explores how these intangible materials can act as catalysts to focus our awareness on our present location in space and time. Novak’s diverse body of works—audiovisual installations, performances, recording, and prints—ask participants to reclaim the present moment as a political act. His works have been released by 901 Editions, Dragon’s Eye Recordings, LINE, Room40, and Touch, among others.

Robert Crouch is an artist and curator whose work encompasses sound, performance, and technology. As an artist, he locates his work with the intersection of post-phenomenological listening practices, conceptual sound art, and contemporary electronic music. At its core, his work can be understood as a conversation between tonality, context, history and subjectivities. Similarly, Crouch’s curatorial work focuses on the overlapping disciplines of sound, technology, movement, and performance. Crouch is currently the Executive and Artistic Director for Fulcrum Arts and the Artistic Director for the A×S Festival. His works have been published by Dragon’s Eye Recordings, LINE, and Touch, among others.

Taking influence from ethnographic film, bioacoustics, and noise music, Ian Wellman merges real and imagined worlds to create consuming acoustic portraits. His work is created from single tape loops, effect pedals, and field recordings, often focusing on themes based on the environmental collapse. Wellman’s solo efforts have been released on Room 40, Dragon’s Eye Recordings, Touch Radio, and Industrial Coast. Along with Aaron Bartell, he is part of the collaborative listening duo Zzyzxzyzz, which focuses on electromagnetic and other inaudible by ear sound worlds. Ian Wellman works and resides in Los Angeles.

Seattle Composers’ Salon

An evening of music and discussion with Seattle composers, curated by Tom Baker:

Carson Farley
Garrett Fisher
Satchel Henneman
Clement Reid

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.

Satchel Henneman: Life is No Way to Treat an Animal, Pt. 3

Life is No Way to Treat an Animal Part Three is the third installment of commission concerts performed by Satchel Henneman, featuring new works by Tom Baker, Dayna Hanson, and Gregg Belisle-Chi. Henneman is a skilled classical and improvising guitarist, performance artist, and composer. He is a recent graduate of Cornish College of the Arts’ music department, where he cultivated a strong relationship and foundation with the world of choreography and movement. Satchel is committed to performing music of living composers, particularly works by his fellow colleagues and fellow artists. He has performed in many masterclasses and concerts around Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

Tom Baker’s piece Resonate, for solo guitar and fixed media, utilizes a sound exciter transducer to transform the surface of the guitar into a loud speaker. The fixed media is derived from the resonance of the guitar and is then projected through the resonance of the guitar body as loud speaker.

Tom Baker has been active as a composer, performer, and producer in the Seattle new music scene since arriving in 1994. He is the artistic director of the Seattle Composers’ Salon, the co-founder of the Seattle EXperimental Opera (SEXO), founder of the new-music recording label Present Sounds Recordings, and is currently Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts.

Dayna Hanson’s piece Mimus Polyglottos was created as a collaborative experiment with Satchel Henneman. The piece was inspired in part by Theirry de Mey’s work with composed movement, and in response to the prompt of flipping the paradigm of physical technique in music; that there would be a primary focus on “beautiful” movement with a secondary, resultant sounding. Dayna also took inspiration from the song of a Mimus Polyglottos (Mocking Bird), transcribing their song into a symbolic system where the vitality and rhythm of the movement necessary to produce a symbol is isomorphic to the sound it describes.

Dayna Hanson has been creating work in dance, performance and film since 1987. Based in Seattle, she has toured her work throughout the U.S. and in Europe. Her films have screened at film festivals worldwide. Dayna’s body of work in dance includes abstract pieces and original dance theater created from disparate, cross-disciplinary sources. Her work in film runs from narrative to experimental to dance cinema. Among a range of honors, Dayna was awarded a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2010 United States Artists Foundation Oliver Fellowship in Dance and a 2012 Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award. Dayna was a 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellow.

Gregg Belisle-Chi’s piece Fear and Trembling, for solo electric guitar, was written in memoriam of all the slain children from gun violence. It is a fusion of his earlier works “Fear and Trembling”, based on the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament, and “Victim”.

Gregg Belisle-Chi is a guitarist and composer living in Brooklyn, New York. Throughout his career, he has performed with Bill Frisell, Cuong Vu, Steve Swallow, Reid Anderson, Ted Poor, Eyvind Kang, Ben Goldberg, Wayne Horvitz, Tom Varner, Bob Sheppard, Jay Clayton, and Jessica Dobson (Deep Sea Diver, Beck, The Shins). He maintains an active career in music as a leader, sideman, and educator.

Pneuma

Pneuma is:
Rose G., voice
James Falzone, clarinet and electronics
Frankie Howe, clarinets
Michael Winograd, clarinet

“It’s strange to think that a band of three clarinets and a single voice can conjure up a world of infinite possibilities, but that’s what Pneuma delivers. Music this beautiful, intricate, and heartfelt deserves to be celebrated—and treasured.” — Alexander Varty of The Georgia Straight, Vancouver, BC

PNEUMA (πνεῦμα) is an ancient Greek word for “breath”, “spirit” or “soul”. Pneuma’s sound is kaleidoscopic – many worlds entangled – with extended techniques and layered effects blending with soulfulness and an exposed vulnerability. Jewish-music intertwines with contemporary classical compositions and free-jazz improvisations. Pneuma’s instrumentation is unusual and full of breath, allowing every band member to reimagine their role and find their ground in new and innovative ways. The quartet zooms in-and-out, shifting perspectives from the very personal to the global, from intimacy to a loud roar. The poetry (sung in English) comes from many corners of the world including Christina Rossetti (UK), Forugh Farrokhzad (Iran), James Joyce (Ireland), Mayumi Terada (Japan), and Ono no Komachi (9th century Japan). These texts coincide with wordless pieces such as Gottlieb’s “Neither You Nor I”, inspired by a solo by the late bassist Ora Boasson-Horev. Pneuma made their premiere at the 2017 Vancouver International Jazz Festival and their 2019 debut album, “Who Has Seen The Wind?” on Songlines Recordings.

Earshot: Travis Laplante

Travis Laplante is a saxophonist, composer, and qigong practitioner. His tornado of a performance with Gerald Cleaver at last year’s festival was one of the great Earshot shows. He returns, this time solo, for what is sure to be a breathless showing.

Laplante has made a name for himself through his imaginative compositions and fierce playing style, endlessly fueled by circular breathing. His mystifying and transporting playing qualities align with his belief that music “should be played and heard with every cell of the body.”

Heavily influenced by Taoism and the practice of qigong, Laplante seeks to empty the ego of its own desires and wants. He’ll often walk into a room with no agenda except to become one with the room and the audience.

This was the inspiration for performing live and recording seven consecutive nights of pure improvisation in southern Vermont — a brutal process of emptying to discover moments of magic and crushing vulnerability. The result are self-churning moments of humility and growth with profound new depth, compiled on Laplante’s album, human, set to be released in November on New Amsterdam Records.

Presented by Earshot Jazz Festival.

GraceANN Cummings

Pianist GraceANN Cummings gives the Seattle and World premiere of the first seven of Garrett Fisher’s new Ragas for Solo Piano. Although these pieces may appear to resemble classical compositional “studies” by title, they are unique in both process and product. With their brevity, connectedness, and improvisational nature they demand a unique signature from each performer’s interpretation. Each etude is a silent blueprint – a set of visual descriptions that intentionally disguise Fisher’s inspiration to allow the performer’s unique discovery process and interpretation, which ultimately leads to a mutual, co-creation of the music and its meaning for performance. These etudes are more similar to rules for a board game or even a play than traditional musical compositions. Neither fully represents the intended creation; both depend on a player’s selection from multiple, if not innumerable, interpretive possibilities, yet each execution reflects a recognizable essence of the game or play.

Also included in the concert will be Gorecki’s Sonata for Piano, African Diaspora inclusive of composers Nkeiru Okoye, Joshua Uzoigwe, Wallace McClain Cheatham, J.H. Kwabena Nketia and Scriabin etudes.

Body.Space.Time.Sound Vol. 4: Cube

An Evening in Sound and Movement Performance
Created and Curated by Alia Swersky and Tom Baker

Two sound artists, and two movement artists merge from duet into quartet. One music, movement pair begins in a slow, spacious conversation of sounds and gestures. The other duet begins their own conversation parallel to the first. Gradually, through moments of synchronicity, resonance, and overlaps of space, the duets begin to converge. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts as the two duos become a quartet, but more than a two dimensional shape…a square, a rectangle…they become a cube, three dimension and six sided…four performers, the audience, and the space.

Sound: Tom Baker, Kate Olson
Movement: Alia Swersky & Corrie Befort

What is B.S.T.S? What happens when seasoned musicians and movers come together to create variable durations of improvisational performance?

These improvisational events will consist of a varying selection of curated sound and movement artists who will be brought together in purposeful improvisational collaborations. These ongoing performance happenings will selectively group artists with the intention of instigating dynamic collaborations. Each event will consist of a unique set of guidelines in relation to body, space, time and sound, but the constant for each grouping is that they connect in some way before the performance. Selected artists will be introduced, then asked to score and rehearse their piece in accordance with the indeterminacy of meeting one another, the performance themes of each event, and the convening of their shared interests. A goal is to bring together artists in different disciplines, and bridge diverse performance aesthetics. Performers will be asked to create structured scores that harness the unknown spontaneity of performance.

READ a review at Seattle Dances.