Monday March 24 * doors at 7 show at 7:30 * $15-25 * TICKETS
Lepidopterans - an all-star quartet featuring Tom Boram, John Dierker, Jason Willlett, and Toshi Makihara. Opening set by Simone Baron.
Tom Boram and Jason Willett have been playing together for almost 25 years as ‘Leprechaun Catering.” The Baltimore-based duo makes improvised music from electronics that is strange and dark, yet joyful and humorous. Their music reflects their influences: the outer space analog echoes of the Barron’s “Forbidden Planet” and the Solar Arkestra’s “Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow”, or the sarcastic industrial noises of Northern England’s late 1970s, or the inscrutable textural puzzles of Cecil Taylor’s “Unit Structures” or Incus’ “Company Week” collaborations, and/or the child-like plasticity of the “moogsploitation”-album era, or the vintage TV and cinema sounds of De Wolfe and Chapelle library music.
Boram is also a harpsichordist, organist, filmmaker and multi-media artist. He has had his films/videos and multi-media installations featured throughout the USA, Mexico and Europe. He is a founder of Baltimore’s 25-year old improvised music festival, High Zero.
Willett is also a bass player, producer, record store owner. He has been playing bass in the infamous art punk band Half Japanese with Jad Fair for 30 years. He is a founder of Baltimore’s Megaphone Records and the True Vine Record Shop. He has played on, recorded and produced hundreds of albums.
"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.
Toshi Makihara studied drums, percussion and improvisation with Sabu Toyozumi, a prominent percussionist in Tokyo. Since arriving in the United States in the late 1970’s he has worked with various new music ensembles as well as with numerous dance and theater companies internationally. Makihara has provided original music to Arden Theater Company, Diversions Dance Company (Wales), Pennsylvania Ballet, ZeroMoving Dance Company and Leah Stein Dance Company among others, and has worked with musicians including Steve Beresford, Peter Brotzmann, John Butcher, Nels Cline, Eugene Chadbourne, Tom Cora, Amy Denio, Thurston Moore, William Parker and John Zorn. He has also collaborated with poets, visual artists, filmmakers and performance artists widely.
Simone Baron is a polyglot pianist, accordionist, improviser and composer whose work “ego-less, genre agnostic and without expectations” (JazzTimes) engages curiously and charismatically with a broad spectrum of idioms. Educated at Oberlin and Tel Aviv University and joyfully de-educated at festivals and performances across Europe and the Americas, Simonehas won grants, fellowships, commissions and residencies from Chamber Music America, South Arts, the Hambidge Center, Sacatar Foundation, Strathmore, Marble House Project, Avaloch Farm, the Banff Centre, and Spectrum Toronto to name a few. In 2016 Simone founded Arco Belo, a diasporic chamber music ensemble that has toured nationally. Simone is a Victoria Artist and plays a Poeta XB Accordion, and is a founding member of the Boulanger Initiative.