image copyright Heike Liss
Saturday October 5 * 8pm * $20 * TICKETS
Fred Frith Trio w/ visuals by Heike Liss
Dave Ballou solo trumpet
Presented in partnership with Capital Bop
The Fred Frith Trio began life almost by accident in 2013. A couple of low key local gigs gave rise to a European tour, a debut record on Intakt, and then another tour a couple of years later. By now the group has created an identity that seems to revolve around memories of a bygone psychedelic era filtered through the lens of razor-sharp improvisation. Whether this will remain the prevalent focus remains to be seen. Their last Intakt CD, Closer to the Ground, has been described as “a gripping piece of spontaneous timelessness”, “ a vital statement from a singular artist and his inventive crew”, “a magical , transcendent world”. The trio regularly cooperates with musical guests such as trumpeter Susana Santos Silva or saxophonist Lotte Anker, and visual artist Heike Liss.
Fred Frith is a songwriter, composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist best known for the reinvention of the electric guitar that began with Guitar Solos in 1974. He learned his craft as both improviser and composer playing in rock bands, notably Henry Cow, and creating music in the recording studio. Much of his compositional output has been commissioned by choreographers and filmmakers, but his work has also been performed by Ensemble Modern, Hieronymus Firebrain, Arditti Quartet, Robert Wyatt, Bang on a Can All Stars, Concerto Köln, and Rova Sax Quartet, among quite a few others. Fred enthusiastically records and performs all over the place with icons of contemporary music, younger players you may never have heard of and everyone in between. He is the subject of Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel’s award-winning documentary film Step Across the Border.
Jordan Glenn, drums, spent his formative years in Oregon drawing cartoons, taking dance classes from his aunt, and putting on plays with his sisters. As he got older he began making movies with his friends and studying lots of jazz, classical, and rock music. In 2006 he relocated to the Bay Area where he has since worked closely with Fred Frith, William Winant, Zeena Parkins, Ben Goldberg, Todd Sickafoose, John Schott, Dominique Leone, Lisa Mezzacappa, Karl Evangelista, Michael Coleman and the bands Jack O' The Clock, Arts & Sciences, Beep!, tUnE-yArDs, and the Oakland Active Orchestra. Jordan leads and conducts the long-standing trio Wiener Kids—and its ten piece expansion, The Wiener Kids Family Band—and directs the conduction ensemble Beak.
Jason Hoopes, bass, was born and raised in the mountains of Northern California. He began teaching himself to play guitar and bass in high school after discovering thrash-metal, and eventually found himself at Mills College where he met Jordan Glenn and studied with Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, Zeena Parkins, and Joëlle Léandre. Since graduating from Mills, Jason has become a highly sought after bassist in the Bay Area's diverse and explosive music scene. Primarily recognized for his work with the critically acclaimed avant-rock band Jack O' The Clock, as well as with Annie Lewandowski’s powerdove and Dominique Leone, he also improvises in a wide range of contexts.
Heike Liss has been developing and refining tools that allow her to mix and digitally draw over personal video footage in response to and in dialogue with improvised live music. Drawing Sound is a collaboration with her partner and traveling companion Fred Frith. Together they have performed with musical improvisers such as Lotte Anker, Ikue Mori, Okkyung Lee, Chris Cutler, Susana Santos Silva and Shelley Hirsch among others. Heike also performs live visuals with skratchklang, her duo with violinist/composer Thea Farhadian. Heike takes her cues from the people and the world around her and works in a variety of media, including video, photography, drawing, sculpture, site specific installation and public intervention. Her award-winning work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and at film and music festivals. She has collaborated with choreographers Sonsherée Giles and François Verret, musicians Ellen Fullman, GAW, Marcus Weiss, Caroline Penwarden, and Theresa Wong, multi-media artists Ellen Lake, Nomi Talisman, and Michael Trigilio, painter Soffia Saemundsdottir, and poet Lyn Hejinian, to name a few. She lives and works in Oakland and Basel and teaches Transdisciplinary Art at the Universidad Austral de Chile.