Addleds – the brutally minimal improvising quartet of Kyle Bruckmann (oboe/English horn), Tony Dryer (contrabass), Jacob Felix Heule (percussion), and Kanoko Nishi (koto) – explores counterintuitive cross-genre collaboration in a mini-series supported by the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music’s Musical Grant Program. Night 3, the finale, features two varied chamber-jazz groupings: special out-of-town guests Douglas Detrick’s Anywhen Ensemble, and Lisa Mezzacappa’s String Band. A set by each group will be followed by an improvised ‘first meeting’ of a subset of the musicians.
Douglas Detrick’s AnyWhen Ensemble is dedicated to the performance of original music by its founder, leader and trumpeter that brings jazz and classical musicians together to create a hybrid music with unique possibilities. Its signature instrumentation of trumpet, saxophone, bassoon, cello and drums sets the group apart, but the ensemble makes its most significant impact with highly creative and individual repertoire, a fluid integration of dynamic chamber performance with jazz improvisation, and with its bold vision of a more diverse and more vibrant present and future for music.
The AnyWhen Ensemble was awarded the New Jazz Works and Presenting Jazz grant from Chamber Music America in 2011. This extremely competitive grant, attracting over 250 applicants every year, commissioned a new work by Detrick called The Bright and Rushing World, an ambitious addition to this singular composer’s list of accomplishments. A recording of this work will be released in 2013.
The group has performed at the Jazz Gallery and the Stone in New York, and on festivals including the Festival of New Trumpet Music curated by Dave Douglas, and the Is That Jazz? Festival in Seattle, WA curated by Tom Baker. The group has also performed and given master classes at colleges across the country including Cornish College of the Arts, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, University of Oregon, and Willamette University.
Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco Bay Area-based bassist, composer, and musical instigator. An active collaborator and curator in the Bay Area music community, she leads her own groups Bait & Switch and Nightshade, and co-leads the ensembles duo B., Cylinder, the Permanent Wave Ensemble, the Mezzacappa-Phillips Duo, and the Caribbean folk band Les Gwan Jupons. Lisa has released her own recordings on the Clean Feed, NoBusiness, Leo, Evander, Odd Shaped Case and Edgetone record labels, and has recorded as a sideperson for the Tzadik, Kadima and Porto Franco labels. She collaborates frequently on cross-disciplinary projects in sound installation, film/video, sculpture and public music/art. Her String Band is a new ensemble featuring Murray Campbell (violin), John Finkbeiner (guitar), Crystal Pascucci (cello), Tim Perkis (electronics) and Jordan Glenn (percussion).
Addleds explores timbral and textural extremes of distended instrumental technique via improvisation and open-ended compositional strategies. Their music tends towards a brutalist minimalism as informed by the noise underground as by recent developments in the field of free improvisation.
Individually, the members have performed with other groups and regular collaborators across the gamut of new music both local (Basshaters, Ettrick, Ghost in the House, Jacob Lindsay, Pink Mountain, Jon Raskin, Gino Robair, Aram Shelton, Shudder, sfSound) and elsewhere (Michel Doneda, EKG, Boris Hauf, Giuseppe Ielasi, Lozenge, Polwechsel, Jack Wright, C Spencer Yeh). Since they began developing their collective sound in 2010, they have performed at the Switchboard Music Festival and many of the area’s improvised music series. Their debut album is a 2013 cassette release on Weird Ear.
Addleds Sound Laboratory is made possible through the Musical Grant Program, which is administered by the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, and supported by the Heller Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation and San Francisco Grants for the Arts. http://sffcm.org