2021 CATALYTIC SOUND FESTIVAL
Outdoors at Rhizome DC (+ Livestream)
Two days of improvised performance featuring many of DC's most forward-thinking musicians and dancers alongside stellar representatives of various East Coast scenes. Part of the month-long international Catalytic Sound Festival. Each day will feature longstanding working groups and first-time ad hoc groupings. Each day will start with a panel discussion addressing the role of the arts (improvised performance in particular) in moving society forward.
October 30 4-9pm - TICKETS // livestream tix
Heart of the Ghost [Ian McColm / Jarrett Gilgore / Luke Stewart] + Khalid Thompson
Janel Leppin’s Ensemble Volcanic Ash [Janel Lepping / Anthony Pirog / Brian Settles / Kim Sator / Larry Ferguson / Luke Stewart / Matt Mitchell / Sarah Hughes]
Hanna Olivegren + Noelle Tolbert
No Land + Alma Laprida + Rex Delafkaran
Jenny Moon Tucker + Leo Svirsky + Thomas Stanley
Jamal Moore + Orlando Johnson + Peter Redgrave
panel discussion: Collectivity and Independent Music - Thomas Stanley, Jenny Moon Tucker, Khalid Thompson; moderated by Jamal Moore
October 31 4-9pm - TICKETS // livestream tix
JUST ADDED - We Were Here Before [Luke Stewart / Mark Cisneros / Nik Francis]
Ada Pinkston + Nate Scheible + Wendy Eisenberg
Ben Hall + John Dierker + Nik Francis
Kirsten Lies-Warfield + Sarah Hughes + Shelly Purdy
Weed Tree [Amanda Huron / Layne Garrett] + Aquiles Holladay + Basheer Bassene
panel: discussion: Composers as Improvisers, Improvisers as Composers - Ada Pinkston, Ben Hall, Shelly Purdy, Wendy Eisenberg; moderated by Luke Stewart
Catalytic Sound is a music based co-operative designed to help create economic sustainability for its artists through patron support.
Made possible by a grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
Poster by Jenny Moon Tucker.
Basheer Bassene is a dancer based in Washington DC.
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Rex Delafkaran is an Iranian-American interdisciplinary artist and dancer from California. Delafkaran holds a degree in Ceramics and Performance Art from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited and staged performances at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC), Panoply Performance Lab (Brooklyn, NY), Southern Exposure Gallery (San Francisco, CA), and the Textile Museum (Washington, DC) among others. Delafkaran was the Exhibition Director of Hamiltonian Artists in Washington for 3 years, and co-founded an artist-run storefront gallery project called "but, also" in 2021. Delafkaran makes her work at STABLE Arts Studios, curates independently, teaches movement and ceramics practices, and continues to perform and exhibit nationally and internationally. rexdelafkaran.com/
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"Multi-reedman John Dierker has become a major improvisational stylist . . . interweaving concepts augmented by howling lines, injections of blues-drenched choruses and Albert Ayler-like display of energy." (All About Jazz.) A Baltimore, Maryland native Dierker has worked in a wide variety of musical settings collaborating with Peter Zummo, Jason Willett, Jad Fair, The Basement Boys, Michael Formanek, and Marty Ehrlich, to name a few. He is a longtime member of Lafayette Gilchrist and The New Volcanoes. Currently he is working with Quartet Offensive, Lubbock, and Microkingdom as well as freelancing in the Baltimore/D.C. area.
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Wendy Eisenberg is an improvising guitarist, banjo-player, vocalist and poet. Using the languages of free jazz, new music, metal and art song, their music challenges the representational and technical demands placed on a guitar and a banjo in contemporary music.
They have two solo careers: improviser/composer, and songwriter. Wendy’s debut record as an improviser, “Its Shape Is Your Touch,” came out in October 2018. Her trio, “The Machinic Unconscious,” with Ches Smith and Trevor Dunn, released their debut album on Tzadik that same month. Both records made Billboard’s Critic’s Choice Top Ten Jazz Records year end list, and received features and attention from NPR and National Sawdust. Their album of quiet art-pop songs, Time Machine was remastered and re-released on Feeding Tube records on September 7th, 2018.
In addition to their work as a solo artist, they have written and performed in numerous projects, including the critically acclaimed experimental band Birthing Hips, described by NPR as “brainy, noisy punk based in sonic adventure, technical mastery, and rejection of the status quo.” They lead a rock trio, Editrix, which explores similar parameters.
Their work as an improviser has led them to collaborate with Matt Mitchell, Trevor Dunn, Ches Smith, Ted Reichman, Joe Morris, Damon Smith, Shane Parrish and Zach Rowden, among many others. They has premiered work by John Zorn, Matt Mitchell, Ted Reichman, Maria Schneider, and Marta Tiesenga, as well as works by their many peers, and has premiered her own work at The Stone, The New School, the Hartt School of Music, New England Conservatory, and Hampshire College.
Wendy has provided soundtrack work for the scientific projects of MIT Media Lab fellow and scientist-artist Ani Liu. Their poetry has been set into two large scale works by Matt Curlee, premiered at the Eastman School of Music in 2014 and one awaiting its premier featuring percussionist Michael Burritt. Their writings on music can be found in John Zorn’s Arcana VIII: Musicians on Music, Sound American Ed. 23, and in the “Improvisation and Inclusion” edition of the Contemporary Music Review. www.wendyeisenberg.com/
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Nik Francis is an improvising musician based in the D.C. area. His music focuses on the drum kit, often incorporating electronics and small acoustic instruments. topology.bandcamp.com/
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Layne Garrett is an improvising musician and instrument builder based in Washington DC. He works with prepared guitars, found objects, and self-built instruments. He plays in the improvising duo Weed Tree with drummer Amanda Huron, as well as in regular and irregular collaborations with a spectrum of players from across the DC and Baltimore sound universe. He is an active promoter of the musical culture, hosting house shows for the past decade+ and more recently as a founding member and curator for Rhizome DC. He leads instrument building and sound exploration workshops and camps for kids at various educational institutions around town. He has travelled to play at events like High Zero in Baltimore, XFest in Massachusetts, Voice of the Valley Noise Rally in West Virginia, H-O-T Series of Improvised Music and Dance in Philadelphia, and Frantasia Festival of Out Music and Arts in Maine. Other activities have included facilitating a large-scale tape-loop intervention in Rock Creek Park, constructing participatory installations for the Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music and for the DC Listening Lounge's annual Sound Scene event, and building a playable gong-map of the USA out of found car metal. In reference to a particular large freestanding sound structure he built, a collaborator commented: "man i would really love to play that big baby for 12 hours straight it is obviously a meditation key." laynegarrett.bandcamp.com/
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Jarrett Gilgore is a multi-instrumentalist, improviser, composer, and teacher currently residing in baltimore, maryland. He performs actively in the usa and internationally in a wide variety of contexts.
Current projects: heart of the ghost with Luke Stewart & Ian McColm, USA/Mexico Collaborative trio Tulpas, duos with Anthony Pirog and Anna Roberts-Gevalt, and a new solo project called lilypicker.
Recent collaborations: Jaimie Branch, Tony Malaby, Susan Alcorn, Laraaji, Lonnie Holley, Mabe Fratti, Chris Pumphrey, Zach Rowden, No Land, Anna & Elizabeth, Dan Deacon, Cass McCombs Band.
Recent pre-pandemic performances: Bucareli 69 (Mexico City), Firehouse 12 (New Haven), Casa del Popolo (Montreal), Constellation (Chicago), Philadelphia Museum of Art, le Poisson Rouge (NYC), Duke University, Jazzorca (Mexico City), Zaal 100 (Amsterdam). jarrettgilgore.bandcamp.com/
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Ben Hall studied W. African percussion with Jumma Santos and trapset and precognition with Milford Graves at Bennington College in where he also worked with Bill Dixon on his last small group recordings. Hall is currently a research fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College. www.bennington.edu/academics/faculty/ben-hall
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Aquiles Holladay grew up living internationally. Born in Japan, spending time in Turkey and Latin America in his formative years, he draws much of his inspiration from his global experiences and multicultural family history. In 2010, while living in Paramaribo, he was invited to Shanghai World Expo for “Our Story” a dance piece choreographed in collaboration with Art Lab Suriname, and to French Guyana for Norma Claire’s annual 6e Rencontres de Danses Métisses with a solo work “Saturnalia”. Aquiles has been making music with computer devices since the 90's. As a graduate of George Mason University with a BA in Dance, has perform with various dance organizations in the DMV. He has perform with various dance organizations in the DMV, and continues to hone his passion for improvisational movement as a member of Nancy Havlik's Performance Group, and as a Samba dancer in the DMV area. soundcloud.com/aquilesholladay
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Sarah Marie Hughes is a performing artist who resides in Maryland. She plays the saxophone, flute, and clarinet and also creates on the guitar and piano. Her improvising vocabulary is influenced by jazz music and contemporary improvisation.
From 2004-2008 Sarah studied classical saxophone performance with Dale Underwood at the University of Maryland and earned a bachelor's degree in music education. She received a master's degree in jazz saxophone performance from the New England Conservatory in Boston where she studied with Jerry Bergonzi, Donny McCaslin, Ran Blake, Anthony Coleman, and Ben Schwendener.
Sarah has performed extensively in various concert settings in venues throughout Washington DC and Baltimore, with occasional concert performances in NYC and Chicago. Before studying jazz formally at NEC, she shared the stage with an impressive list of jazz luminaries, including but not limited to Lee Konitz, Dan Tepfer, Matt Wilson, Freddie Redd, Mary Halvorson, Alison Miller, and Ted Brown. After graduating from NEC, Sarah continued to have opportunities to share the stage and bills with great improvisers, including Joe Morris, William Parker, Hamid Drake, Daniel Carter, and Fay Victor. In 2015 she traveled to Sweden with Amy K. Bormet's ensemble Ephemera, to participate in their first Women in Jazz Festival.
In 2018 Sarah released her first album, Coy Fish, containing free improvisation and poetry, with Sam Burt on daxophone, Daniel Ostrow on bass, and Nate Scheible on drums. Live performances by the quartet invited audiences to participate in collective improvised drawings and balloon playing. In 2019 Sarah released her second album, The Drag, which included Sam Burt on bass clarinet, Steve Arnold on bass, and Joseph Leo Arkfeld on moog. The album includes performances of Sarah's graphic scores and improvised singing/reading of her prose.
In 2019 Sarah participated in an interdisciplinary collaboration at the D'Clinic Studio Residency in Zalaegerszeg, Hungry which resulted in the creation of a book containing her visual art and prose. www.sarahmariehughes.com/
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Amanda Huron has played experimental and punk music, mostly on the drums, since 1991. She has been actively engaged in D.C.’s underground music communities for decades. She has both played and helped organize hundreds of shows and events in the city, in particular at cultural spaces La Casa and the Back Alley Theater, and under the auspices of the neighborhood microradio station Radio CPR, which she co-founded. She is a native of the city. Selected musical projects: Weed Tree (2010-present); Puff Pieces (2013-2019); Miracles (2008-2010); Caution Curves (2004-2006); Vertebrates (2000); Scaramouche (1997-2000); Stigmatics (1996-1999); Impetus Inter (1994-1996); Period (1991-1992). amandahuron.net/
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Orlando Johnson: "We embrace nonsense and chaos. Non verbal exploration to cope and understand through multi-disciplines of expression. May such research inspire, create beauty, and add to the nonsense and chaos of what we call everyday."
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Alma Laprida (1985, San Miguel, Argentina). After living and working in Buenos Aires for ten years, she's based in Maryland, USA, since 2021.
Alma composes and plays pieces for trumpet marine, synthesizers, lyre and other non-conventional instruments and objects such as megaphones, nylon bags, home appliances and toys. She works with sound using an intimate, contemporary language and explores the territories among composition, improvisation, performance and installation.
She played and performed at all major museums in Buenos Aires. She made sound installations at Teatro Verdi (La Boca, Buenos Aires), the art gallery Valenzuela Kremmer (Bogotá, Colombia) and CasaPlan for Festival Tsonami (Valparaíso, Chile). She was a guest artist at the International Festival of Experimental Music of Sao Paulo, Brazil (FIME, 2015) and made a residency at GIS Studio of Audition Records (Mexico City, 2016).
She released a solo album (Audition Records) and several pieces in compilations in labels such as Adaptador Records, Ratordog, Sisters Triangla, Isla Visión, También Dormimos, Carbono Proyecto Records and Sub Rosa.
In Buenos Aires, she created the series of concerts Ciclo Hertz and a project for collaborations between visual and sound artists named Estrépito y contemplación. She worked as a freelancecurator for independent projects. She was Curator-In-Chief at the Centro de Arte Sonoro, which depends on the Ministry of Culture (Argentina). almalaprida.wordpress.com
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Kirsten Lies-Warfield hails from Fargo, North Dakota. She did her undergraduate work at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She holds a Master of Music degree in trombone performance from Indiana University where she was a student of M. Dee Stewart. In April 1999, Ms. Warfield won a position in the U.S. Army Band "Pershing's Own" becoming the first woman trombonist in the unit's history. There she took over the National Solo Competition and ran it from 2009 until 2017. Now retired from that organization, she continues to seek new avenues to learn and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in audio technology. In 2019, Ms. Warfield was selected as a performance fellow for the Bang on a Can Summer Festival where she worked with Pulitzer Prize winning composers, Julia Wolfe and David Lang and performed with members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Ms. Warfield is currently second trombone with the Arlington Philharmonic and has also served as principal trombone of the Washington Metropolitan Philharmonic and the Prince George's Philharmonic. She is a regular member ofthe contemporary music group, Great Noise Ensemble, and the ethno-funk band, Black Masala. She was elected to the ITA Board of Advisors in 2018 and also volunteers with the International Women’s Brass Conference. She is an educator, teaching low brass students at Episcopal High School and through Full Blown Trombone. Ms. Warfield is also an active composer performer, writing works to suit her needs and tastes to perform for local and national audiences. kwarfield.wixsite.com/kirsten-warfield
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Ian G. McColm is a multi-instrumentalist and composer residing in New Haven, CT. He currently performs internationally with a variety of ensembles including Washington D.C. free-music trio Heart of the Ghost, Figured (with bassist Zach Rowden), New Haven’s Center, as well as with an array of solo artists.
McColm has performed at Moogfest, Hopscotch Music Festival, Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music, Elastic Arts' Exposure Series, The DC Jazz Festival, Black Mountain College's Interlude AVL Festival, and as a part of Experimental Sound Studio’s The Quarantine Concerts.
McColm's music has been featured by WFMU, Adhoc.fm, Dusted Magazine, Mike Watt’s “The Watt from Pedro Show,” Tabs Out Cassette Podcast, and Tiny Mixtapes. Ian can be heard on releases from Three Lobed, Trouble In Mind Records, I Dischi Del Barone, Dagoretti Records, and his own imprint, Pidgeon Records. igmnoise.com/
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Jamal R. Moore is a native of Baltimore, a multi-instrumentalist, composer/performer and educator. His background includes the California Institute of The Arts (M.F.A. 2012), Berklee College of Music (B.M 2005), Eubie Blake Jazz Orchestra (2000) under the direction of Christopher Calloway Brooks and historically-acclaimed Frederick Douglass Sr. High whose alumni include Thurgood Marshall, Cab Calloway, and Ethel Ennis.
Some notable luminaries Jamal has worked with are Wadada Leo Smith (2013 Pulitzer finalist) whom he studied with at California Institute of The Arts, Nicole Mitchell, Sabir Mateen, Roscoe Mitchell, David Ornette Cherry (Organic Roots Nation), Tomeka Reid, Dr. Bill Cole, DJ Lou Gorbea, George Duke, Sheila E, David Murray, JD Parran, Ras Moshe, Tatsua Nakatani, Hamid Drake and Yahyah Abdul Majid (Sun Ra Arkestra).
Jamal currently leads his own groups, Akebulan Arkestra, Napata Strings, Black Elements Quartet, Organix Trio, Interstellar Duo and co-leads Ancestral Duo with Luke Stewart. downbeat.com/news/detail/jamal-moore-of-organix-trio-surveys
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image: Richard Ross
No Land is an artist, poet & curator – born and working in New York City. Her work has been recognized for continuing the lineage of downtown NYC artist counterculture, honoring an intuitive vow towards creation. In her visual creations & poet-performance work with musicians, No Land’s art evokes reverence for mystery and chaos. She left art school in 2011, prioritizing spirit encounters with downtown artists, poets and activists, such as Occupy Wall Street's street art builders, Steve Cannon's Tribes Gallery, and Anne Waldman's outrider poet worlds. As a poet & vocalist, she has performed in collaborative works at Jazzfest Berlin, Crossing Borders Festival in the Hague, Enclave Festival (Mexico City), LaMaMa Galleria (NYC), The Kennedy Center (DC), Roulette Intermedium, Issue Project Room, & on NYC street corners during the 2020 pandemic. In 2018, she released Authentic Artifice, an art-book of poetry and photographs, published by Newest York, with other forthcoming publications in 2021. Her work has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Disonare, The Village Voice, and in publications by Bill Moyers and Levy Gorvy Gallery. No Land has been grateful to work with NYC artists: Anne Waldman, Daniel Carter, Heroes are Gang Leaders, Pat Steir, & other special spirits. www.maepoe.com (image credit: Richard Ross)
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Hanna Olivegren is a singer and composer from Stockholm, Sweden born in 1987. She started studying music at the age of ten at a choir school and from there went on to study voice more individually in high school, pre-collage school and took her bachelor degree in 2014 at The Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Hanna’s passion has always been to explore the different colors and textures of her voice and works with both improvised and composed music. Currently she is a member in three different groups, composes, arranges concerts, workshops and freelances. The groups are ZOMES, H.O.W and Silence Blossoms. ZOMES is a duo based in Baltimore, with Asa Osborne (former member of Lungfish). This collaboration is also the reason Hanna moved to Baltimore in November 2015. H.O.W is Hanna’s solo project where she is both the composer and producer. She is releasing solo music under this name and recently started a group in Baltimore with Zach Branch, Matt Lampart & Ines Nasarra. Silence Blossoms is a group based in UK and Sweden that works with poetry, improvisation and British folk music. The other members in group in Gus Loxbo and Sam Andreae. hannaolivegren.com
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Ada Pinkston (b. New York) is a multimedia artist, educator, and cultural organizer. Her art explores the intersection of imagined histories and sociopolitical realities on our bodies, using monoprint, performance, video, and collage. Inter-subjective exchanges are the primary substrate of her work. Over the years, her work has been featured at a variety of spaces, including The Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, The Walters Art Museum, The Peale Museum, Transmodern Performance Festival, P.S.1, The New Museum, Light City Baltimore, and the streets of Berlin. She is a Halcyon Arts Lab Fellow (2018), Baker Artist award semifinalist (2016); a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Grit Fund Grant in Visual Arts, administered by The Contemporary (2017); and a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Ruby’s Project Grant in Visual Arts in (2017). In addition to her studio practice, she is a co-founder of the LabBodies Performance Art Laboratory in Baltimore, Maryland. She is currently a lecturer in Art Education at Towson University. adapinkston.com/
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Shelly Purdy is a contemporary percussionist and teaching artist from Maryland, currently living in Baltimore City where she has for the past decade been committed to presenting new and experimental music. Her sonic explorations tend to favor the mingling of found objects with more traditional instruments and an affinity for chance and silence whenever possible. These sonic worlds are explored through work with ensembles such as Umbilicus; a percussion quartet consisting of Baltimore improvisers’ Tom Goldstein, Paul Neidhart, and Will Redman. She is also a founding member of the science/music ensemble The Inverse Square Trio which seeks to demonstrate and illuminate acoustic properties and aural illusions through the works of Alvin Lucier, Steve Reich, Diana Deutsch, Richard Feynman and others. Purdy also embraces more traditional musics, most recently being her study with Professor Gina Beck on Javanese & Balinese Gamelan percussion. Purdy has been a member of The High Zero Foundation and Red Room Collective since 2016 and is happy to announce the forthcoming release of her duo tape “Six Improvisations for Two Vibraphones” with Will Redman on 20/20 Records. soundcloud.com/shelly-purdy-1 inversesquaretrio.com/
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Peter Redgrave is a cultural worker, an artist, and educator, based in Baltimore, Maryland. "The world of the imagination is not a separate world, it is woven through our bodies and draws us into the possibilities each moment offers. My work begins with the body and seeks to nourish embodied wonder with absurd potentials. I aspire to be the clown, the fool, the bumbler who speaks in riddles at the feet of authority. I work to facilitate experiences for people through performances, recordings, videos, and text based work that refract our complicated contaminated world. May we find wonder and humor in the patterns that arise.
The heart of my research is the energetic exchange between audience and performer. Yet, in a global pandemic, how do we signify performer? The resonance of nervous systems drives me to create events where sensation, thinking, and empathy intertwine to re-shape people’s perspectives. In the face of a climate emergency and the great reckoning with global capitalism’s desire for complete control of life, we are offered little room to make meaningful choices. And yet we go on. Let us fill our bodies with visions of adaptation and resilience that persevere as we are marked." peterredgraveperforms.com/
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Nate Scheible is a DC-based drummer who has performed and recorded in a variety of bands and ensembles spanning multiple genres over the past 25 years. Collaborators in recent years include Sarah Hughes, Nik Francis, Layne Garrett, the Nancy Havlik Dance PerformanceGroup, and the band Mock Identity. While his background is largely based in improvisation, his recent solo work has focused on the manipulation of magnetic audio tape, featured prominently in releases by the labels ACR (Fairfax, 2017), Never Anything (Indices, 2019), and Unifactor (Prions and Scrapie, 2020). His album Fairfax will be getting a vinyl reissue by Warm Winters Ltd in fall, 2021. Nate is also an active curator and organizer at the non-profit community arts space Rhizome DC. natescheible.bandcamp.com/
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Thomas Stanley (a/k/a Bushmeat Sound) is an artist, author, and activist deeply committed to audio culture in the service of personal growth and social change. As performer and curator, Bushmeat Sound has been an integral part of a visionary music scene straddling the Baltimore-Washington corridor. His audio work employs musical sound to anchor, frame, and accelerate our subjective experience of history. In 2014 he authored the Execution of Sun Ra, a critical response to the cosmological prognostications of the late jazz iconoclast. Dr. Stanley has spent three decades exploring the ramifications of Alter Destiny, Sun Ra's unique construct for a just and sustainable AfroFuture. He has written and lectured extensively on emergent musical cultures and is co-author of George Clinton and P-Funk : An Oral History (1998, Avon paperback). He hosts "Bushmeat's Jam Session," a weekly collage of radical music heard on WPFW-FM radio. His doctoral work examined Butch Morris' art of Conduction as an extended meta-instrument offering unique opportunities for musical pedagogy and ensemble consciousness. He is also featured in “Stranger”, a documentary film about seminal P-Funk and Talking Heads keyboardist Bernie Worrell.
Stanley’s Black Art is a loudly joyful noise, illuminated by Black light, the thundering gasp of serendipity in the caverns of bohemia as audio intentionality releasing frothy bubbles of anti-sovereignty, expanding microtemporalities erected as positive ghettoes of solar real estate, Blackadelic afterFutures outside of americanExceptionalism, yielding at least one tripped-out-impossibility of a timeline where no one ever dreamed america and the maroons never came down out of the hills and the Jankanu is still being danced on bloody feet that have never been enslaved and no tin-star soldier ever nullified Strange Fruit.
In 2003, Stanley was drafted by broadcast legend Bobby Hill to help design and launch an undergraduate course at George Mason University exploring Hip Hop as a complete cultural system. This highly popular course quickly turned into an assistant professorship which Stanley held until 2017 when his position was converted to adjunct status. Stanley/Bushmeat is an Independent Public Intellectual/Sound Artist working in the wilds of early 21st century North America because Black Art, Black Light, Black Sound, Black Love, and Black Lives Matter. eatbushmeat.bandcamp.com/
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Luke Stewart is a DC/NYC-based musician and organizer of important musical presentations, and has a strong presence in the national and international Improvised Music community. He is noted in Downbeat Magazine in 2020 as one of “25 most influential jazz artists” of his generation. He was profiled in the Washington Post in early 2017 as “holding down the jazz scene,” selected as “Best Musical Omnivore” in the Washington City Paper’s 2017 “Best of DC,” chosen as “Jazz Artist of the Year” for 2017 in the District Now, and in the 2014 People Issue of the Washington City Paper as a “Jazz Revolutionary,” citing his multi-faceted cultural activities throughout DC.
In New York City, Luke collaborated with Arts for Art in hosting the first ever “Free Jazz Convention” to share resources and strategies among the community. He has also performed in a myriad of collaborations and performances in venues such as the Kitchen, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pioneer Works, Roulette, and Issue Project Room.
Luke is also a presence in the greater community of Creative Musicians, with regular multi-city ensembles including Irreversible Entanglements, Heroes are Gang Leaders, and Ancestral Duo, Six Six featuring guitarist Anthony Pirog, and experimental rock duo Blacks’ Myths.
As a solo artist, he has been compiling a series of improvisational sound structures for Upright Bass and Amplifier, utilizing the resonant qualities of the instrument to explore real-time harmonic and melodic possibilities.
He has performed at many important venues in DC, NYC, and around the world.
As a scholar/performer, he has performed and lectured at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Medgar Evers College, George Mason University, Wayne State University, University of Montana, New Mexico State University, and the University of South Carolina.
He holds a BA in International Studies and a BA in Audio Production from American University, and an MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship from the New School.
In 2019, Luke was also a finalist for the Johnson Fellowship, citing his work in changing the musical fabric of Washington, DC. thelukestewart.com/
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Leo Svirsky (b. 1988, USA) is a Russian-American pianist and composer currently based in the Hague, Netherlands. His music explores the instability of listening and the disorientation of memory and affect while remaining grounded in history and symbol, song and story. His varied musical interests have led to performance situations as diverse as Richmond VA's Cat Mansion, the Kremlin Armoury, and the Cathedral of Nantes.
His most recent album River Without Banks was released on Unseen Worlds in 2019. It's title is taken from a chapter in Genrikh Orlov's Tree of Music, in which he describes the experience of listening to the chant It is to be immersed with, not operated upon, for being, not for doing... It is not expected to lead back to where it started, but instead it leads forward, to an unknown yet anticipated point in the future… leosvirsky.com/
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Born and raised in Richmond VA, Khalid Thompson discovered a passion for poetry during creative writing classes in high school. Post-graduation, he sought to challenge his solitary nature via performance outlets such as acting and acoustic guitar. However, there persisted a deep desire within him to find an artistic path more suited to his inherent personality. In the spring of 2006 he decided to move to Washington, DC to gain inspiration from a culturally diverse, international city.After a serendipitous meeting with a charismatic visual artist from the Ivory Coast, Khalid began to reinvestigate a childhood love of drawing. The steady encouragement of this new friend coupled with a renewed sense of self led Khalid to explore his own abstract style of art. The creative freedom and process of improvisational painting became a perfect fit. Since 2008 he has completely devoted himself to painting and drawing.
Khalid Thompson’s art is the spontaneous application of color and mixed media designed to emphasize free expression. Using intuition, he manifests a broad spectrum of abstraction that suggests relationships to jazz, nature, the African Diaspora and African culture. www.khalidthompson.com/
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Noelle Tolbert has used dance, choreography, performance art, teaching, and storytelling to heal and connect people in order to challenge how we engage with and define art. With a commitment to movement expression training for over 15 years, Noelle has become fluent in the movement language of hip-hop, popping, house, modern, ballet and movement research technique. Her talent has graced the stage with training received from Rennie Harris Puremovement, Colleen Hartman, and Music and Motion Dance Company in Philadelphia. Noelle has performed at numerous venues throughout the tri-state area including the Philly Fringe Festival and Live Arts for all five productions including International Touring in Canada. Upon moving from Philly to Baltimore, Noelle blossomed in dance and performance art from being a member of Poetic Xpressions Contemporary Dance company, Co-Founder of TolbertD'Agostino Dance, Dance Chair and Creative Director at Chesapeake Arts, collaborated with LabBodies, TransModern Festival, Akimbo, Artscape, LeMondo, Hanna Olivgren, and she continues to open herself to new endeavours throughout Baltimore, Philly, and NY.
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Introduced to the creation of music through studying piano and clarinet as a youth, Jenny Moon Tucker found herself aimlessly studying English at university, with a insatiable appetite for experiencing sound and listening. Acquiring a monophonic synthesizer, a record player that could go down to 16 RPM, and a four-track tape recorder, they began weaving their own music into form. Digging the clarinet out of the closet and receiving the gift of a C-Melody sax provided the tools to more fully express her voice. After making certain sonic realizations, she met some likeminded individuals in the Washington DC area, proceeding to record, tour, and release a plethora of long players with the collective Twilight Memories of the Three Suns. Shuffling around the country for some years and tasting the experiences different environments provided, they collaborated with folks young and old, noise and jazz veterans alike. Settling in Baltimore in 2013 she found a living making preserves, and has been cultivating a relationship with growing medicine and food at Greenspring Punch, a small farm north of Baltimore. By allowing music and improvisation to continue to shepherd her through life, she feels better capable to surf the density of the human condition and seeks to channel healing and encourage imaginative exploration and listening with her work. Some highlights of their performance history have been working with the High Zero Foundation and the True Vine in Baltimore, Rhizome and Union Arts in DC, Vox Populi in Philadelphia. They highly value the intimacy found in the countless living rooms and basements that have also provided space to share their vision. Jenny Moon Tucker primarily plays Alto Sax and percussive textures sourced though a variety of scrappy tools and contact microphones. Through play she coaxes voices out of objects that speak to her. She currently performs and records by herself and in various collaborations in the Baltimore and DC area. jennymoontucker.bandcamp.com/
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