April 15, 2019
Doors At 7. Music At 7:30pm
Percussionist and composer Adam Shead is a highly prolific member of Chicago’s improvised music scene. Along with drumming and writing for a number of creative ensembles, he also organizes the Improvised Series at Slate Arts and Performance. Adam will perform a set of music for solo drums, followed by a duet with the versatile Matt Piet on piano. This will be Adam’s premier performance on the Option stage.
Set 1 - Adam Shead (drums) solo
Set 2 - Adam Shead with Matt Piet (piano) duo
Adam Shead (b. 1993) is an American percussionist, composer, and educator specializing in interdisciplinary and improvised performance. Shead holds a bachelors degree in Percussion Performance from Columbia College Chicago as well as a Graduate Certificate in World Performance Studies and a Masters in Contemporary Improvisation from The University of Michigan. Adam has performed at renowned music festivals such as The Ann Arbor Edge Fest, The Chicago Jazz Festival, Homebody Festival in South Bend, IN, and The Present is Present Festival in Amsterdam, NL. Adam has performed alongside such musicians as Mary Oliver, John Dikeman, Jasper Stadhouders, Jason Stein, Steve Swell, Tim Daisy, Anna Webber, and Matt Piet. Adam is the founder of such groups as Adiaphora Orchestra, Piet/Piazza/Shead, Dikeman/Stadhouders/Piazza/Shead, and the Stein/Shead duo.
Matt Piet, a former student at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Leader of two fundamental bands in the city, Matt Piet Trio and Four Letter Words, and one of the vertices of the Rempis / Piet / Daisy triangle, he has broken into the Chicago improvised music community as a “melodic player” whose “tonefulness is thrillingly shaken by a rhythmic volatility and a fractal sense of phrasing”, according to the jazz journalist Peter Margasak, who compared his sound to Cecil Taylor in the late ‘50s and the early ‘60s. Piet’s is a welcome approach to the city’s fertile improvised music scene.
Photo credit: Matt Schwerin (Matt), Peter Gannushkin (Adam)
April OPTION performances are generously sponsored by Petzel gallery.
