Thorny Brocky is Aaron Novik's newest creation, a live ensemble that performs music from all of Aaron's previous projects. This includes Floating World, an art song/pop band, Simulacra, a clarinet metal band, Crafty Apples, a minimalist chamber improv group, Gubbish, a gypsy jazz folk group, and Love Triangle Elementary School, an indie rock/experimental improv band among others.
The group consists of Aaron Novik- bass clarinet and compositions, Kasey Knudsen- alto sax, Dina Maccabee- violin, Marie Abe- accordion, Lisa Mezzacappa- bass and Jamie Moore- drums.
We will be premiering a new work, in progress, of music based on characters from Aaron Novik's forthcoming graphic novel "The Dragon Awakens."
Marc Mellits is one of the leading American composers of his generation, enjoying many performances throughout the world. His unique musical style is an eclectic combination of driving rhythms, soaring lyricism, and colorful orchestrations that all combine to communicate directly with the listener. On CD, Mellits' music can be found on Black Box, Endeavour Classics, Cantaloupe, CRI/Emergency Music, Santa Fe New Music, & Dacia Music.
Missy Mazzoli was recently deemed "One of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York," (NY Times), and "One of the new wave of scarily smart young composers (Sequenza21). She writes for melodicas, out of tune guitars, and electronics, as well as orchestras and string quartets to create a unique and personal sound.
Ruby Fulton's musical habits have been summed up as "Write what you like, take delight. Repeat." (NewMusicBox) She grew up in Northwest Iowa and now lives and works in Baltimore. She is co-director of Rhymes With Opera, a company dedicated to bringing new opera into unexpected places.
Gerard Beljon: "I was born in Holland in 1952 and studied lute, guitar and composition in Amsterdam. I wrote music for all kinds of classical ensembles and orchestras, but also a lot of music for theatre. To me music is communication, and I like people to understand what I am saying and feeling. In the case of Beat I chose to combine influences of pop music with classical piano techniques.
If you want to listen to more of my music or find out about concerts or scores, please go to www.gerardbeljon.nl"
Kate Campbell performs frequently as a soloist and chamber musician specializing in late 20th century and contemporary works. She has worked with many leading composers, including Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and David Lang, as well as premiering many works by emerging composers. She has had the pleasure of performing with members of Bang on a Can All-Stars, SIGNAL, and Eighth Blackbird. She is the newest member of Redshift, a New York-based contemporary music ensemble. Recent projects include appearances with the Adorno Ensemble, performing for the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, and recording for New Amsterdam Records. Kate is also the co-director of New Keys, an ongoing concert series in the San Francisco Bay Area showcasing new and adventurous works for the piano.
Regina Schaffer performs all over the Bay Area as a soloist, accompanist and ensemble member. She annually helps organize and performs in New Keys. She has also been teaching piano privately for the past 12 years to students of all ages and levels. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in piano performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music where she studied with Mack McCray. She is currently at Mills College pursuing a Master’s Degree in piano performance and literature.
TESLIM (Tes-LEEM) means both ‘commit’ and ‘surrender’ in Turkish and features two well known Bay Area musicians: violinist Kaila Flexer and Gari Hegedus on oud, Turkish saz, Greek lauoto and other (mostly plucked) stringed instruments. This potent duo performs Greek, Turkish and Sephardic music. In addition, both Flexer and Hegedus are composers whose original music is based on these fertile traditions. Both seasoned performers and recording artists, Teslim released its debut (self-titled) CD in December 2008. This unusual duo is at home in classical, early music, and folk music venues and holds workshops on a variety of topics.
The San Francisco-based Sqwonk bass clarinet duo is a dynamic and adventurous ensemble devoted to exploring the full expressive range of the bass clarinet, from deep resonances to raucous wails. Though grounded in the classical tradition, Sqwonk plays music that draws on a wide range of influences, from klezmer to heavy metal to blues to avant-garde improvisation, creating a repertoire that is both contemporary and broadly accessible to a wide audience.
Formed in the Spring of 2005 by Jeff Anderle and Jonathan Russell, Sqwonk has given over thirty performances throughout the San Francisco Bay Area at a wide range of venues and events. National tours include the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, Gallery Icosadedron in NY, and the Stillhouse Theater in Philadelphia, as well as masterclasses at Princeton and Catholic University. This summer, Sqwonk will be traveling to Austin, TX to perform at ClarinetFest 2010.
This concert will be the CD release show for our second CD, "BLACK"!
As a composer, pianist, and musical saw / Vietnamese dan bau soloists, Luciano Chessa has been active in Europe, the U.S., and Australia. Among his compositions, it is worth mentioning a piano and percussion duet after Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Petrolio, written for Sarah Cahill and Chris Froh and presented in 2004 at the American Academy in Rome, Il pedone dell’aria for orchestra and double children choir, premiered in 2006 at the Auditorium of Turin's Lingotto and subsequently released on DVD, Louganis (San Francisco, Old First Concerts, 2007), for piano and TV/VCR combo, Inkless Imagination IV (UC Davis, Mondavi Center, 2008) for viola, mini-bass musical saw, turntables, percussion, FM radios, blimp and video projection (both works in collaboration with artist Terry Berlier), Recitativo, aria e coro della Vergine (Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory, 2008), and Strelitzie, a newly published work for amplified baritone and string orchestra.
Composer and clarinetist Jonathan Russell is active in a wide variety of music, from classical to experimental to klezmer to church music. His work stretches the boundaries of contemporary classical music, opening it up to the sounds and attitudes of the other musical traditions surrounding it. He has received commissions from ensembles including the San Francisco Symphony, Empyrean Ensemble, ADORNO Ensemble, Woodstock Chamber Orchestra, and Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and has collaborated with choreographers Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton. An avid performer on clarinet and bass clarinet, Jonathan is a member of the heavy metal-inspired Edmund Welles bass clarinet quartet and the Balkan/klezmer/experimental band Zoyres. He also plays in, composes for, and is a founding member of the Sqwonk bass clarinet duo, which has commissioned new works from twelve composers in the past three years. He is co-director of the Switchboard Music Festival, an annual eight-hour marathon concert that brings together the Bay Area’s most creative and innovative composers and performers, who are stretching the boundaries and definitions of contemporary music. Jonathan has a B.A. in Music from Harvard University and an M.M. in Music Composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His composition teachers have included Dan Becker, Elinor Armer, Eric Sawyer, John Stewart, and Eric Ewazen.
Sabbaticus Rex is an ensemble rooted in the supremacy of sound over music, the triumph of tone over time and thought. This process uses haunting and beautiful acoustic instruments and methods: overtone gongs, shakuhachi (bamboo Zen flutes), Taimu (bass) shakuhachi, and throat-singing. This is sound, but not music. It is primordial easy-listening for dinosaurs: slowly shifting elemental dialogues between fat flutes and big gongs.
Through spontaneous, sustained sound structuring, these sources combine to form a resonant, expansive and raw environment. Creating music with a majority emphasis on slow-evolving sound and texture, there is no narrative, socio-political, or otherwise extra-musical plot or agenda involved with this non-music. That being said, it does derive form and perspective from elements such as breath, overtone/harmonic resonance, imagination, and simplicity within chaos. Gongwoman extraordinaire Karen Stackpole and reed renegade/Zen flute adept Cornelius Boots are the core members of the ensemble; they are sometimes joined by Sitar and acoustic bass wizard/virtuoso Mark Deutsch, inventor of the Bazantar.
RVSQ was formed in 2003 by premier San Francisco violinist/composer Irene Sazer. Since then, the quartet has performed to sold out audiences around the Bay Area. The group is thrilled to announce the release this February of their first studio album. RVSQ’s influences range from traditional American string band music to contemporary improvisation, from Brazilian folk rhythms to hypnotic meditations from West Africa. Through it all, the threads of spine-tingling vocal and instrumental harmony and fearless, inspired improvisation weave a web of original acoustic music played with a deep groove.
David Klein and Nick Woolley formed the musical/visual duo of Billygoat, producing stop-animated films and performing their live, original scores. These films have been described as "stop-motion shorts of staggering complexity," created one tiny movement at a time via tens of thousands of individual photographs of an ever-morphing art piece. These photos are then stitched together to become an elaborately detailed and captivating art film, bringing their other-worldly aesthetic to life.
During live sets, the films are projected onto a wall-sized screen as Klein and Woolley play an original musical arrangement on harp, keyboards, accordion, glockenspiel and electric bass. This sonic accompaniment, coupled with the intricate visuals, have played to sold out theaters in performances described as "breathtaking" and "delicately haunting." -Alie Ward LA Weekly
Matt Small's Chamber Ensemble has been heard in performance since 2002, including its 2005 Carnegie Hall debut. The sextet (bass, piano, saxophone, clarinet, violin, drums) blends elements of a modern classical ensemble with those of a flexible jazz/improvisatory group. Paula Dreyer (piano), Kymry Esainko (piano), Steve Adams (saxophones), Mitch Marcus (saxophones), Rachel Condry (clarinet / bass clarinet), Sarah Jo Zaharako (violin), and Micah McClain (drums) are some of the Bay Area's most talented players, assembled uniquely for this project. Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a gifted San Francisco bassist and composer whose alluringly original music draws on a rich range of classical, jazz and indigenous music,” Matt Small has been developing his own cutting-edge, multi-genre work in the Bay Area since 1997. As a performer, composer, and producer, Small currently leads three distinct ensembles: Matt Small’s Chamber Ensemble, The Crushing Spiral Ensemble, and The Bedlam Royals. Small has performed at The San Francisco Jazz Festival, The Monterey Jazz Festival, Banff’s International Music Festival, The Tanglewood Music Center and Carnegie Hall with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, along with other major venues throughout the Bay Area and on the East Coast. As a freelance bassist he has performed with Northern California symphonies and chamber groups such as The Berkeley, Monterey, Santa Cruz, and California Symphonies, Oakland Opera Theatre, as well as played in numerous bands and projects of all kinds. Small has been featured on NPR’s "All Things Considered," the NHK TV documentary on The Silk Road, and on numerous Bay Area radio stations such as KALW and KPFA. Compositional honors for Small include Subito Awards and an NCCCP Award from the American Composers Forum, as well as commissioning and funding awards from Intersection for the Arts’ Jazz at Intersection Series, the De Young Museum’s Cultural Encounters Program, The Zellerbach Family Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Armed with just her cello and a small box of electronics, Zoë Keating is a one-woman orchestra. She records layer upon layer of cello, her feet dancing over an array of pedals to transform her solo performances into multipart works.
Born in Canada and classically trained from the age of eight, Zoë studied music at Sarah Lawrence College in New York City and the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole in Italy. After graduation she moved to San Francisco and began working in computer software while moonlighting as a cellist with dance troupes, theater companies and rock bands. Inevitably, she combined the two, and developed her now signature style while improvising for late night crowds in her San Francisco warehouse space.
Zoë's self-produced album "One Cello x 16: Natoma", which rose to #1 on the iTunes Classical and #2 on the iTunes Electronica charts, is the direct result of that experimentation. She has since performed her music live on National Public Radio, on television, outdoors in the Nevada desert, in medieval churches, in punk clubs, and before thousands of screaming teenagers in mainstream rock venues across North America and Europe.
miRthkon: Oakland, California's latest entry into a rich tradition of anti-tradition, is fully prepared to effectively blow your mind with their highly idiosyncratic brand of sonic blasphemy! Their music features an inimitable blend of quirky prog rock, avant-garde jazz, contemporary classical abstraction, thrash metal, and oddly enough: pop accessibility that defies categoratization.
In May of 2009, miRthkon released their debut full-length album, VEHICLE, on the Italian Avant-Prog label AltrOck Productions. Clocking in at just under 70 minutes, VEHICLE integrates miRthkon’s live repertoire—all with enhanced arrangements possible only in the studio—into a larger conceptual framework including absurd commercial parodies and evocative sound design elements yielding what band leader Wally Scharold calls “a movie for your ears.” VEHICLE was produced by Scharold and mixed by legendary art-rock producer Dan Rathbun (of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum). The album covers a wide gamut of stylistic influence ranging from classic Zappa quirkiosity, Meshuggah math metal, and contemporary classical abstraction reminiscent of Anton Webern, Pierre Boulez, and Iannis Xenakis. True aficionados will not want to be without the equally complex and beautiful 16-page booklet that accompanies the CD, amplifying the themes presented on the disc and expanding on them in beautifully rendered text and images, realized by Scharold in collaboration with several Bay Area visual artists.
miRthkon continues its ambitions in 2010 with the production of a feature film which will combine live performance footage shot exclusively for the film with selections from their unique live video repertoire and some altogether new narrative content building on the multitude of conceptual thematics presented in VEHICLE. The film is still in the early pre-production stages and will be released in conjunction with their 2nd studio album featuring several new compositions including contributions from drummer Matthew Guggemos and our newest member, bassist/vocalist Matt Lebofsky. Stay tuned.
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