SGC Electric Quintet (Steve Ball, Travis Metcalf, Brad Hogg, Dev Ray, Don Box) is a subset of Seattle Guitar Circle, local chapter of the legendary League of Crafty Guitarists playing intricate, polymetric music arranged for electric guitar ensemble. SGC EQ perform structured improvisation that sounds composed and composed collaboration that sounds improvised. This international community was initially born via Robert Fripp’s ‘Guitar Craft’ workshops that began in 1985. Each SGC performance is a combination of tightly-arranged chaos, layered guitars ‘circulations’ – where each guitarist plays one note at a time in evolving melodies.

Julie Slick will open and collaborate with SGC EQ. Julie is a virtuoso bassist and composer known for her wide array of unique tones and substantial melodic invention. Throughout her career, she has developed a distinctive voice through international performances and recordings with acclaimed first class musicians in global progressive rock and jazz communities. She currently tours and makes albums with the Adrian Belew Power Trio and her own bass duo-fronted band, EchoTest. As of 2022, Julie has joined Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew’s Remain in Light project, celebrating the music of the Talking Heads. Since 2023 she has performed with her fellow RIL cast, jam/funk group Cool Cool Cool to support shows across North America. She has also collaborated/appeared on stage with: the Crimson ProjeKct (featuring Tony Levin and Pat Mastelotto), Les Claypool, Danny Carey, Victor Wooten, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Robert Fripp, Stewart Copeland, Alice Cooper, Ann Wilson, Jon Anderson, Wynonna Judd, Lzzy Hale, Vicki Peterson, Mike Keneally, Marco Minnemann, Petra Haden, Kris Myers, and more.

Chris Cochrane and Kevin Bud Jones have been playing music together since 2013, initially in the band Collapsible Shoulder. Chris and Kevin would play gigs as a duo between Collapsible gigs, and continue to do so now. Their music has been described as neo-psychedelic with unpredictable twists and turns, an electronic sonic mash. In the fall of 2023 they composed and performed the score for Jim Hubbard’s film Nostalgia, which premiered at the LGBT Community Center in NYC as part of the NYC Aids Memorial Project arts program. Their most recent project it a new live score for Linda Austin’s dance piece, In Preparation for Disappearances to Come, on Feb. 6 – 8 at PICA in Portland.

Chris Cochrane is a Brooklyn-based guitarist/improviser/noise-maker/composer. Active in the Downtown NYC avant music scene since 1982, Chris has composed music for dance, theater and film, and has collaborated with a host of musicians including Zeena Parkins, John Zorn, Tim Hodgkinson, Billy Martin, Loren Connors, Marc Ribot, Jessica Pavone, Miguel Frasconi, Jamaaladine Tacuma, Gabby Fluke-Mogul, Brandon Lopez, Gelsey Bell, Galvin Weston, Stew,  Eszter Balint, and many others. Chris co-founded the band No Safety with Zeena Parkins, and has been a member of numerous other bands, such as Curlew, Suck Pretty, The Same, Krackhouse, and others.

Kevin Bud Jones Kevin Bud Jones has been performing and recording music solo, in groups and various collaborations since the late 70s. Originally a guitarist, he is currently exploring analog synth and electronics. While enjoying a thirty plus year career in the NY film business, always kept his hand in music and the performing arts, as well as collaborating with visual artists from time to time. In the early 80s he played in Dog Eat Dog, a proto-DIY dance band that has a second posthumously released live LP coming out soon. His trio Airport Seven with painter/drummer Steve Dibenedetto, and bassist John Terhorst performed their final show at The Kitchen in NY in December 2013, around the same time he and Chris started playing together in Collapsible Shoulder. 2024 saw the beginning of a new project incorporating electronics and tape loops in live performance that should see daylight come Spring.

Singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Sue Ann Harkey has been a part of Seattle and New York’s underground music and visual arts scenes for decades. Her work blends philosophical and political lyrics as a songwriter with instrumental improvised music inspired by free jazz, electronic, folk, and Middle Eastern and African elements. Harkey discovered improvisational music’s power in 1979, when she began playing guitar with friends; this led to her exploration of the harp-guitar and the 12-string guitar, which she played with mallets, bows, plectrums, rods, and metal discs woven between the strings on invented alternate tunings. By 1980, Harkey formed the cassette label/political pamphlet distributor Cityzens for Non-Linear Futures (CNLF) and the improv group Audio Leter. She has recently self-published ‘a visual memoir’ bookzine featuring her black and white 35mm documentation of Seattle and New York’s early (1979-1988) performance art scenes.

Presented by Nonsequitur.

Strange Bedfellows are found in the crawlspace between ancestral ritual and becoming the inner child who just wants to play with toys and friends. Strange Bedfellows is a duo linking Adam Levitt and Silas Morrow, formed over impromptu public practice sessions in Seattle and surrounding areas. The duo will make use of saxophone, flute, violin, percussion, synthesizer, metal objects, toys, found discarded objects, and small consumer electronics. Most objects have been passed on or gifted by loved ones and everything else was found in random but significant circumstances. 

Opening up the evening are Glad We’re Together and BRB. Seattle based Glad We’re Together weaves innocent wonderment with human introspection and spiritual gathering through the use of flutes, harmonium drones, and imagination filled objects. Glad We’re Together is helping and you’re invited. BRB is a performance troupe coming from Olympia, WA. The group is composed of enigmatic poet Reid Urban along with musicians and performance artists Ben Kapp and Ben Michaelis. BRB is a controlled eye brow falling in Denny’s.

In celebration of his birthday, trumpeter and composer Ray Larsen presents a special set of music with his chamber sextet, Reasons Why. Featuring some of the most high-profile and in-demand improvisers in the region, this group has not been able to appear for over a year. The band plays Ray’s compositions which gravitate between lush harmonic textures and dense melodic interplay, along with plenty of improvised departures that bring each performance to new territory. Reasons Why is:

Ray Larsen – trumpets
Leanna Keith – flutes
Conner Eisenmenger – trombone
Maria Scherer Wilson – cello
Wayne Horvitz – piano
Bonnie Whiting – vibraphone and percussion

To open the concert, saxophonist and electronic wind synth artist Greg Sinibaldi, who recently relocated back to the Pacific Northwest from Brooklyn, will present one of his massive and immersive electro-acoustic solo performances.

An improvisation concert honoring late dance innovator Steve Paxton with collaborative performances by seasoned musicians and dancers using Contact Improvisation duets, ensemble play, video and audio recordings.

This concert brings freshly seasoned dance and music improvisers from Seattle and abroad to replay, discover and spread the gravity of late dancer extraordinaire, Steve Paxton, who famously said “…being essentially objective, Newton ignored what it feels like to be the apple…”

Paxton’s query regarding the small dance of standing, “Can it be smaller?” steers the Contact Improvisation style duet SMALLER by Karen Nelson and Nica Portavia in collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Evan Strauss and cellist Lori Goldston. The performers give their current answer as they explore the gigantic space found even within the most seemingly predictable outcomes.

“Tribute of Small Dance” includes a viewing of the 1989 video “Goldberg in Vermont,” voice recordings, and scrubby clips of Steve to fuel a creative recall played by an ensemble of performers including SMALLER joined by local performers Alia Swersky, Hannah Rice, Christian Swenson, Aaron Swartzman, Scott Davis, Casey Adams, and small dancing others. The urge is to bring a smidge of Steve’s many legacies, pointings, gestures, and queries consciously into this living moment.

Two evenings featuring recent works by composer Tom Baker and others, to honor the passing of guitarist Mark Hilliard Wilson‘s mother, who passed away in 2022.

Thu. Jan. 16 – Wilson premieres Reflections on a Glacier (2023) by Seattle composer Tom Baker. Wilson commissioned this piece, and will feature it in a solo guitar concert along with First Nation composer Pascal Sasseville Quoquochi’s Totems, works by Renaissance titans Josquin De Pres and Diomedes Cato, as well as pieces by Gyorgy Kurtag and Graeme Koehne. 

Fri. Jan. 17 – Wilson will present Baker’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier (2023), a work that grew out of material from the commissioned guitar piece. It is scored for mezzo soprano (Maria Mannisto), alto flute (Sarah Bassingthwaight), viola (Rose Hashimoto), tenor saxophone (Evan Walker), and guitar. The text for this 13-movement song-cycle is based on a poem by Craig Santos Perez. In this chamber work, the solo guitar piece inserts itself between each song, as a kind of Greek Chorus, reflecting on each song and poem.

The concert explores themes of permanence and decay, of love and loss. 

The commission came from a desire to commemorate the life of Wilson’s mother Celia Wilson, who passed away April 14^th 2022. She was a ballet dancer, then choreographer, and Children’s Theater director in San Francisco, as well as in Payette, Weiser, and Boise, Idaho. She was incandescent, living loud, large and with so much joy, though when alone with family, close friends or working with children in plays, she could be quite sober and intimate.  

The theme of titanic and magnificent objects created between 60 million and 2.9 billion years ago disappearing entirely due to our present practices of living and working is a worthy subject in its own right. But it also beautifully serves as a metaphor for the incomprehensibility of losing a loved one. We know it’s going to happen – to all of us – and yet it can still surprise us when the time comes. And scientists have given us so much evidence clearly indicating that we are changing the planet in ways that will make it harder, or impossible, to sustain the myriad of species and of life as we know it. Yet in the face of this imminent unfolding, we have to ask: will we be surprised when the time comes?

Two evenings featuring recent works by composer Tom Baker and others, to honor the passing of guitarist Mark Hilliard Wilson‘s mother, who passed away in 2022.

Thu. Jan. 16 – Wilson premieres Reflections on a Glacier (2023) by Seattle composer Tom Baker. Wilson commissioned this piece, and will feature it in a solo guitar concert along with First Nation composer Pascal Sasseville Quoquochi’s Totems, works by Renaissance titans Josquin De Pres and Diomedes Cato, as well as pieces by Gyorgy Kurtag and Graeme Koehne. 

Fri. Jan. 17 – Wilson will present Baker’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier (2023), a work that grew out of material from the commissioned guitar piece. It is scored for mezzo soprano (Maria Mannisto), alto flute (Sarah Bassingthwaight), viola (Rose Hashimoto), tenor saxophone (Evan Walker), and guitar. The text for this 13-movement song-cycle is based on a poem by Craig Santos Perez. In this chamber work, the solo guitar piece inserts itself between each song, as a kind of Greek Chorus, reflecting on each song and poem.

The concert explores themes of permanence and decay, of love and loss. 

The commission came from a desire to commemorate the life of Wilson’s mother Celia Wilson, who passed away April 14^th 2022. She was a ballet dancer, then choreographer, and Children’s Theater director in San Francisco, as well as in Payette, Weiser, and Boise, Idaho. She was incandescent, living loud, large and with so much joy, though when alone with family, close friends or working with children in plays, she could be quite sober and intimate.  

The theme of titanic and magnificent objects created between 60 million and 2.9 billion years ago disappearing entirely due to our present practices of living and working is a worthy subject in its own right. But it also beautifully serves as a metaphor for the incomprehensibility of losing a loved one. We know it’s going to happen – to all of us – and yet it can still surprise us when the time comes. And scientists have given us so much evidence clearly indicating that we are changing the planet in ways that will make it harder, or impossible, to sustain the myriad of species and of life as we know it. Yet in the face of this imminent unfolding, we have to ask: will we be surprised when the time comes?

A serene evening balancing electronic and string sounds. Otolithia from Portland will make their Seattle debut. Relax in ambient immersive layers of shifting textures and tones. Bring a pillow, mat, or blanket to make yourself comfortable while listening.

Otolithia is an experimental, ambient, and improvisational duo featuring Tatiana Muzica (vocals, flute, electronics) and Josh Faber-Hammond (koto). The name is a fusion of the words ‘otolith’, a calcium carbonate structure in the inner ear imparting equilibrium, and ‘lithia’, or lithium water, which reduces depression and stabilizes moods in those who drink it. They hope their music can help the listener feel more balanced as well.

María Dolores A. Matienzo is a composer, poet, and archivist living on Duwamish land. Her recent works explore ritual, sensory experience, immaterial labor, and memory and memorialization. She has performed experimental music for over 20 years under her own name and as Black Tent and maría de los dolores. She publishes her work on her imprint, Imprecision Art. Her work has also been published by Travesties?!, Fantômes, and American Tapes. she’s buoyant, her first score for ensemble performance, premiered October 24 at Base: Experimental Arts & Space in South Seattle.

Ruth Davidson has been performing on their own and as part of Moraine, in addition to numerous other projects. They will be presenting solo cello.

Seattle Civic Poet Shin Yu Pai shares poems written during her poet laureateship for the city, with music from Leanna Keith (flute and voice), Susie Kozawa (found object-instruments), Steve Peters (field recordings), and Kyle Hanson (accordion). Join us on the longest night of the year for a meditative evening of poetry and improvised music. Bring a blanket and pillow if you wish.

Both Chet Corpt and Sean Gaskell have traveled to what might be described as “The University of Kora”, i.e., the city of Brikama in The Republic of the Gambia. There, two adjacent compounds housed two of the all-time greats of the West African kora, Alhaji Bai Konte and Alhaji Malamini Jobarteh. The former had passed some years earlier, but Malamini carried on an active role in teaching and playing even during his retirement years. A former Minister of Culture, Malamini was the perfect ambassador for this music and certainly left his mark on both players. For both, this training is foundational.

A performance of Mandinka-based music requires a great deal of interpretation and improvisation. It is an 800 year old oral tradition that has no need for the standardization of it’s songs. The student must learn from the beginning to actively participate in the shaping of any musical performance at any level.  Both players believe that while a foundation is necessary, one is inevitably thrown back on what one knows about performance and expression, as an American musician. Through creative experimentation, the hope here is to create an American kora tradition, thereby helping to establish West African Mandinka sound art practice as universal.