December 7th – 8pm – $10
Chris Corsano & Mike Collino
“…arguably the most riotously energetic and creative drummer in contemporary free jazz” – Wire Magazine
“One of the world’s great drummers.” -The Guardian
Chris Corsano (b. 1975, USA) is a New York-based drummer who has been active at the intersections of collective improvisation, free jazz, avant-rock, and experimental music since the late 1990’s. He’s been the rim-batterer of choice for some of the greatest contemporary purveyors of “jazz” (Joe McPhee, Paul Flaherty, Mette Rasmussen, Zoh Amba) and “rock” (Sir Richard Bishop, Bill Orcutt, Jim O’Rourke), as well as artists beyond categorization (Björk for her Volta album and world tour, Michael Flower, Okkyung Lee).
Corsano began a long-standing, high-energy musical partnership with saxophonist Paul Flaherty in 1998. Their style, which they occasionally refer to with (semi-)tongue-in-cheek humor as “The Hated Music”, combines modern free-jazz’s ecstatic collectivism with the urgency and intensity of hardcore punk. A move from western Massachusetts to the UK in 2005 led Corsano to develop his solo music — a dynamic, spontaneously-composed orchestra-of-one utilizing extended techniques for drum set, non-percussive instruments of his own creation (e.g. bowed violin strings stretched across drum heads), circular breathing on modified reed instruments, and stockpiles of resonant metals. He spent 2007-08 as the drummer on Björk’s Volta world tour, all the while weaving in shows and recordings on his days off with the likes of Evan Parker, Michael Flower, and Jandek. He moved back to the U.S. in 2009 and continued touring in an ultrawide array of ever-evolving collaborations. In 2017 he won the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. A renowned solo performer in his own right, Corsano has a new solo record, The Key…, due out next year on the Drag City label.
His dedication to collective improvisation has led to Corsano to join forces with many kindred spirits and his appearance on over 180 records and thousands of live performances. He’s worked with, among others: Paul Dunmall (released by the label: ESP-Disk), Joe McPhee (Roaratorio), Okkyung Lee (Open Mouth), Bill Orcutt (Palilalia), Mette Rasmussen (Hot Cars Warp Records & Clean Feed), John Edwards (OTOroku & Dancing Wayang), Sylvie Courvoisier (Relative Pitch), Nate Wooley (No Business & Astral Spirits), Jim O’Rourke & Akira Sakata (Drag City & Polystar), Merzbow (Family Vineyard), Jessica Rylan (Load Records), Rodrigo Amado (Trost), Nels Cline (Strange Attractors), Heather Leigh (Volcanic Tongue), Ghédalia Tazartès (Ultra Eczema), Ken Vandermark (Audiographic), and Sunburned Hand Of Man (Manhand).
Michigan’s Michael Collino (Dog Lady Island, Alien Passengers) has performed numerous times at the RCH with a his hypnotic and merky string textures. Collino is currently utilizing zither, fiddle and voice processed live though a pile of modified tape recorders.
11/8 8pm $7
Al Margolis & Tom Law (Duo Denum)/ Craig Chin
& J.S. Wang (cincy)
If, Bwana was begun on New Year’s day 1984 by Al Margolis, who was an activist in the 1980s American cassette underground through his cassette label Sound of Pig Music. He co-founded experimental music label Pogus Productions, which he continues to run. If, Bwana makes music that has swung between fairly spontaneous studio constructions and more process-oriented composition.
BigSphinx, aka Tom Law, is a composer/improviser from Saugerties NY who performs laptop-based electroacoustic music. He performs regularly with Al Margolis (contact mics, violin, etc.) as Duo Denum,
and also with percussionist Kevin Cheli in the Cheli/Law Duo. He also plays viola da gamba, and has curated a series of concerts at Opus 40 sculpture park that ranged from early music to avant pop. A native South Carolinian, he opened the figmental Conundrum Music Hall
in West Columbia in 2011, and closed it in 2015.
ERRANT SPACE is a project of composer/recordist Craig Chin. Its goal is spatio-temporal dilation through sound. Performances are site-specific, spontaneous compositions influenced by both the physical characteristics of the space they are performed in and the occupants of that space.
Recent Errant Space projects include the soundtrack for the documentary Baato, and a soundtrack for the tabletop adventure card game Dark Venture.
Craig has also produced the monthly Errant Space Podcast for over seven years, which often features interesting experimental and electronic musicians. (Let him know if you’d like to participate!)
Additionally, Craig has curated several music series, including a monthly electronic and experimental night and the Space Out, Outside series. He also has a weekly radio show, The Space Program, on Vassar College’s Station WVKR.
J.S. Wang ( Outdoor Horse Shrine) from Cincinnati works with electronics and found objects best described as “electroacoustic feedback studies”
Oct 31
9pm $15
TREVOR WATTS
The only founder member of The Spontaneous Music Ensemble still alive. He also founded Amalgam (which included Keith Rowe) and his 1980s Moire Music Group which included Veryan Weston & Peter Knight as well as Phil Minton/Pinise Saul/Lol Coxhill many more and The Drum Orchestra (1980-1997), which involved musicians mainly from Ghana (ECM 1449 CD “A Wider Embrace”). He instigated the 35 piece collaboration with the Drum Orchestra and Teatro Negro de Barlovento (Venezuela) which toured here and also in Venezuela in the 1990’s and around the World on every continent. Other prominent musicians he’s played with include Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, Steve Lacy, Kent Carter, Rashied Ali, Steve Swallow, Bobby Bradford, Cyro Baptista ,Stan Tracey and Veryan Weston.
Watts is featured in “Jazz Brittanica” (a BBC4 film on British jazz and improvised music, 2005. He is featured in many other films on jazz/improv music, some for ARTE TV including filming of two visits to the Roaring Hooves Festival.
Major Jazz Festival appearances include Womad, Glastonbury, San Francisco Jazz Festival, Monterey Jazz Festival, Freedom of the Plaza Festival July 4th in Washington DC, Singapore Arts Festival, Beijing & Shanghai Jazz Festivals, Berlin Jazz Fest, London Jazz Fest, Cervantino Festival, Mexico, New Zealand Festival of Arts, Wangaratta and Darling Harbour Festivals in Australia
Watts is listed in the Who’s Who in the World of Music dictionary.
JAMIE HARRIS
In 1999 JAMIE HARRIS organised a group made up of young musicians for a concert where Trevor Watts was musical director.This group continued to rehearse after that concert and it was during that first rehearsal with no drummer in attendance that Watts handed Harris a drum and asked him to bang it.The group eventually became “Trevor Watts and the Celebration Band”, where Harris served as percussionist. The Celebration Band toured USA / Canada as well as playing several concerts in the UK and Europe.In 2003 Watts and Harris began performing as a duo, taking this project to Mongolia, USA/Canada, Mexico, The Dominican Republic and Brazil among other locations. Since July 2021, Watts /Veryan Weston and Harris formed the group “Eternal Triangle”. Who have since played concerts all over the Uk and EU performing Trevor’s compositions In October 2022 he began improvising danceable funk jazz with Trevor Watts and Mark Hewins in the group JaMaTre
“Jamie vibrates, at the same time as our eardrums, with a virtuosity to make the most experienced Cuban congeros pale! “
Alain Fleche , French journalist
Mike Khoury is a Palestinian-American composer, improviser, and curator focused on experimental music, social research, and the Palestinian diaspora. Khoury’s focus has been on the establishment of the Arab-American avant-garde—documenting the movement’s intellectual heritage through presenting his own work, publishing on the topic, and presenting other artists’ work. Khoury has engaged in community building through his curation of the Entropy Studios space in Hamtramck (1998–2001) and Redford (2014–present), and the Entropy Stereo record label publishing artists such as Faruq Z. Bey and Wendell Harrison. Khoury served as a 2022 Kresge Artist Fellowship panelist in Film & Music.
Ben Hall studied West African percussion with Jumma Santos and trapset and precognition with Milford Graves at Bennington College in Vermont where he also worked with Bill Dixon with whom he made his last small group recordings.
As a founding member of 1/4 speed jazz unit Graveyards with John Olson of Wolf Eyes he has produced over 90 recordings on all media across 30 different labels. Graveyards worked in numerous formats regularly collaborating with Faruq Z. Bey, C. Spencer Yeh, Nate Wooley, and Greg Kelley and performed at the No Fun Festival, Open Circuit, and Michigan Progressive Underground.
Oct 19th
9pm $15
JAAP BLONK + Paracusis + Chameleon Threshold
Jaap Blonk (born 1953 in Woerden, Netherlands) is a self-taught composer, vocalist, poet and visual artist. His unfinished studies in mathematics and musicology mainly created a penchant for activities in a Dada vein, as did several unsuccessful jobs in offices and other well-organized systems. In the early 1980s he discovered the power and flexibility of his voice, and set out on a long-term research of phonetics and the possibilities of the human voice. At present, he has developed into a specialist in the creation and performance of sound poetry and a unique vocal improviser, supported by a powerful and uninhibited stage presence. He performs and gives workshops worldwide on a regular basis. With the use of live electronics the scope and range of his concerts has acquired a considerable extension. To this date Blonk’s music has appeared on 30 CDs with his own Kontrans label; many other recordings as well as about a dozen books with his visual work have been published in several countries
May 20th
9pm $10
In terms of inventive new concepts with historical roots, Montreal’s SILVERVEST- with vocalist Kim Zombik – cooks up a sound that is savory, witty and flecked with surprising twists, with hints of Abbey Lincoln, Billie Holiday and hip-hopping post-beat poetry. Stir and enjoy. » – Josef Woodard, Down Beat May 2022
March 26th
9pm
Jon Mueller & Utility Table
Jon Mueller’s The Future is Unlimited, Always is an examination of time, meditation and loss. In this piece, released in 2022 on the Virtues label as a CD/book, the Wisconsin-based percussionist’s usual repetitive rhythms and textures are replaced with fluid, calm tones, overlaid with otherworldly wails. In live performances of the piece, Mueller employs a variety of gongs, percussion and electronics to create an atmosphere equally as easy to get lost in as it is to be propelled by.
“Mueller’s music is usually completed by the overtones and feedback that arise from the interaction between his playing and the space where it occurs, but for this recording he has drawn those elements into the foreground. Long vocal and metallic tones stretch over subliminally rumbling drums, directing the listener’s attention up and out.” – Bill Meyer, The Wire
“The Future is Unlimited, Always captures Mueller at his most spacious: layers of frequencies and tones that are as engaging as they are mysterious, and capturing more than just audio, but a deeper sense of existence.” – Creaig Dunton, Brainwashed
Mueller’s aim has long been to move drums, percussion and rhythm from its anticipated backbeat to a central musical focus, something more intuitive and natural than usually imagined. Audiences throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United Kingdom have experienced this idiosyncratic point of view as, paradoxically, both ‘cathartic’ and ‘meditative’. Notable solo performances have taken place at the Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, Issue Project Room, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Alverno Presents, SXSW, Big Ears Festival, Hopscotch Fest and Witching Hour Festival.
Outside of his solo work, Mueller has performed and recorded with Mind Over Mirrors, was a founding member of the bands Volcano Choir, Collections of Colonies of Bees and Pele, and has worked in depth with artists Aaron Turner, Faith Coloccia, Dawn Springer, Chris Hefner, Jason Kahn, Asmus Tietchens, Z’EV, Andrew McKenzie, Rhys Chatham, Jarboe, James Plotkin, Duane Pitre, Jonathan Kane, and Raymond Dijkstra.
His solo work has been released by Table of the Elements, Type Recordings, Important Records, Taiga Records, SIGE Records, American Dreams, and others.
Utility Table formed four years ago as an improvisational partnership between Jordan Halsey and Erik Montgomery (aka Dr. Rhomboid Goatcabin). Jordan Halsey, an alchemist of arcane electronics. Erik Montgomery, stochastic shaman of the absurd. Operating in a stream of flow and focus, the pair pull back the veil on the psionic potential of their noise. Be it a trickle of odd beeps, bloops, and clatter, or a torrential cascade of feedback, synth howl, and unholy material action, it is a dance of discovery and revelation. For the night in question, March 26th, expect banana plugs, alligator clips, and broken bathroom bits. Also, Utility Table will be using this show as an opportunity to proudly release their first cassette together, titled “Futility Stable”.
Toledo Bellows 