Wednesday April 10th * 7:00PM * $25 * TICKETS
Transparent Productions presents:
Caroline Davis (alto sax, electronics, voice) and Wendy Eisenberg (guitars, voice)
*We wrote “Accept When” between 2022 and 2023, after a long, beautiful period improvising together intimately in the safety of a friend’s practice space. Our friendship, the quality of attention that colored the light of that and all our other practice spaces, became the basis for our activity and growth as songwriters and our relationship as improvisers. Friendship, how we relate to each other, is our nucleus: the central and essential part of our movement; the positively charged central core of our atom.
A nucleus is supposed to be an especially essential form in eukaryotic cells. Their nuclei are surrounded by a membrane, which in that world permits them to be said to have “true nuclei.” Even their smallest parts, their organelles (incidentally also the name of Caroline’s keyboard heard throughout the record), are held by that membrane. The deepening of our musical friendship, the affordance of space we give to the possibility of synchronicity, the reminders we write of the preciousness of our existence - all of this we put into these songs for you, to help us all accept these miracles and metaphors, in our lifeboats.
Anthony Pirog (guitar), Janel Leppin (cello), and Mike Kuhl (drums)
This Washington, D.C. and Baltimore based combo has been performing as a project for the last year and recently completed a full length recording. Mixing composition and improvisation and drawing from an eclectic range of inspirations has led this ensemble into exciting and energetic places in sound.
Bios:
*Alive with nurturing visions of simple sonic offerings to morph our present situation, Caroline Davis’ main reason for playing music is to connect with others, beckoning new vistas among curious listeners. Her musical journey began in Singapore, in a humid climate, hearing sounds underwater that she would recreate by singing to her German shepherd dogs, who treated her as their own. Her family moved to the United States, Atlanta, Georgia, around age 6, where she encountered R&B and gospel music rife with horns that called her to choose the saxophone 6 years later.
Today, Caroline’s music covers a wide range of styles, owed to this shifting environment. As a leader, she has released seven albums: Live Work & Play (2012), Doors: Chicago Storylines (2015), Heart Tonic (2018), Alula (2019), Anthems (2019), Portals: Mourning (2021), and Alula: Captivity (2023). Her active projects include jazz-leaning Portals, experimental R&B My Tree, and protest band Alula. She has won Downbeat’s Critic’s Poll Rising Star Alto-Saxophonist and has been included in numerous Reader and Critics Polls. Her work has garnered much praise from NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Wire, and a host of international publications.
Davis is active as both a side-person and a leader in a diverse set of expressions. Davis has shared the stage with Lee Konitz, Rajna Swaminathan, Michelle Boulé, Angelica Sanchez, John Zorn, Bari Kim, The Femme Jam, Matt Mitchell, Terry Riley, Miles Okazaki, and Billy Kaye. Outside of these performance relationships, she has been involved with the following mentorship communities: IAJE’s Sisters in Jazz, the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Program, and Mutual Mentorship for Musicians. Grants and residencies supporting a grateful Caroline include: Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chamber Music America, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Hill, Civitella, BringAbout Residency, The Jazz Gallery, and MacDowell. Some of her compositional practice integrates music with cognitive science, influenced by her Ph.D in Music Cognition.
Caroline is an advocate for social justice in the realms of gender (Jazz & Gender at The New School and This Is a Movement) and in the movement for carceral justice (Justice for Keith Lamar). She is organizing community events under the moniker Creatives for Abolition, supporting artistic endeavors and the message of prison industrial complex abolition.
*Over the last five years or so Wendy Eisenberg has been keeping listeners guessing. Nominally an improvising guitarist, they don’t recognize any musical limitations, perpetually finding ways to apply a deeply exploratory practice to a wide variety of contexts. Eisenberg plays solo guitar as well as banjo in both acoustic and electric settings, warped post-punk songs in the trio Editrix, delicately dangerous guitar music in the critically acclaimed Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, country-free jazz in the band Darlin', with Lester St. Louis and Ryan Sawyer, febrile post-Prime Time free jazz in Strictly Missionary, and punk-prog in a trio with Trevor Dunn and Ches Smith. As Eisenberg told fellow guitarist Nick Millevoi in an interview for Premier Guitar in 2021, “I need to be in a punk band at the same time as I need to be playing free improv at the same time as I need to be playing songs. All at the same time—otherwise none of the practices will work for me.” Their musical range isn’t a glib manifestation of eclecticism, but a genuine artistic essence.
Wendy Eisenberg has collaborated with a disparate array of musicians from all points along the creative music spectrum, including Bill Orcutt, Allison Miller, Shane Parish, Francisco Mela, Carla Kihlstedt, John Zorn, and Caroline Davis. They have released music on Tzadik, VDSQ, Ba Da Bing! Records, Garden Portal, Feeding Tube, Out of Your Head, and Dear Life Records, and performed everywhere from intimate basements to international festivals including Moers, Le Guess Who? and Big Ears. They also write words about music and other things, and have published work in John Zorn's Arcana series, The Contemporary Music Review, Talkhouse, and Sound American.
Anthony Pirog, the guitarist, composer and loops magician, is a quiet but ubiquitous force on stages around his hometown. With fearsome chops and a keen ear for odd beauty, Pirog has helped expand the possibilities of jazz, rock and experimentalism in a town long known for its straight-ahead tradition.
Anthony's roots as a guitarist are in the work of D.C. guitar heroes Danny Gatton and Roy Buchanan, and their virtuosic technique that blended all styles of popular music.
He has taken and built upon those roots, working in straight and experimental jazz, improvisation and electronics/looping, and he somehow takes these styles, all of which he has mastered and makes them all work together and also makes them all his own.
Janel Leppin is a picture of versatility. Not only has she been a pillar of Washington, D.C.’s creative music community for the last 20 years, but the cellist, composer, arranger, and singer has made significant marks in other scenes as well. She’s contributed cello arrangements to the Messthetics, played with punk outfit Priests, and records art-pop under the Mellow Diamond moniker. Leppin leans into a jazz-centric vision on the majestic and occasionally abrasive Ensemble Volcanic Ash, which affirms her place as a boundless musician who constantly leaves the listener intrigued. It’s a puzzle in which jazz, chamber music, contemporary classical, and punk seamlessly coalesce with bracing results.
Drummer, recording artist, educator, Mike Kuhl hails from the musical diverse city of Baltimore MD. Kuhl had studied and performed in numerous genres allowing him to be a first call drummer for any situation. A graduate from Towson University, Kuhl has performed locally and throughout the globe alongside jazz greats Dave Liebman, Tony Malaby, Michael Formaneck, Dave Ballou, Ellery Eskelin and Claudio Roditi. Outside of jazz, Kuhl has shared the stage with many international acts such as Beach House, Arboretum, Cigarettes After Sex, Tom Tom Club, and The Ravonnettes. As a leader, Kuhl performs with his trio every Tuesday night at Bertha’s in Fells Point, Baltimore.