Performance: May 11, 2019
Doors at 2 PM, Music at 2:30 PM
$10 Suggested Donation
at Experimental Sound Studio
Experimental Sound Studio is proud to present The Bridge [2.1] for a performance and live recording in the studio as a concluding event in their 3 day micro-residency. Their collaborative efforts titled Crying Out Loud, is an improvisational quintet ensemble featuring Dan Bitney (drums), Christian Bopp (trombone, voice), Rob Frye (woodwinds, electronics), Jayve Montgomery (woodwinds, electronics) and Simon Sieger (trombone, tuba, accordion, piano). The quintet is inspirited by tiny written compositions acting as pretexts for interaction. Fragments of melody, rhythm or texture form an environment in which all musicians evolve in an interdependent organic manner. According to the sound and intention of the individual, the other musicians adapt in the manner of an ecosystem with premeditated conditions. The keyword of this ensemble is adaptation: to the context in which the ensemble is playing, adaptation to the unknown as none of the musicians have played with each other before, and adaptation in terms of sound and concept to the particular fragment that is being interpreted. The quintet format is asymmetrical and creates an unbalanced, anomalous collaborative structure. Simultaneously, the ensemble can act as a typical band with the tuba acting as bass and two horns in the frontline as an alternate rhythm section. More still, the structure can be reversed when three horns play against an electronic section. The reason why fragments are being used as pretexts for improvisation is to bring attention to the infinite possibilities of structuring improvisation, as well as to the richness of pure sound making as defining form.
In conversation, the ensemble shares about the origin of the projects title, individual reflections and their intentions as players in a quintet. Simon Sieger begins:
“The name Crying Out Loud is a reflection of the sad times the world is going through and a paraphrase for the anecdote concerning Peter Brötzmann. Upon being asked why he always played so harshly he answered he couldn’t do otherwise when the world was going [to] such a sad direction.”
Rob Frye adds:
“I've also wondered why Brötzmann plays so harshly, I see how that style reflects his view of the state of affairs in our world. A friend reminded me of Adorno asking 'how can you write lyrical poetry after Auschwitz?' In many ways it would be inappropriate! But I think precisely because of the dark direction we are witnessing, it is even more important to show the world how humans can work together. Art can also teach us about community and about why it is worth remembering that something like beauty exists. Believe me, I too feel like screaming into my horn sometimes! And if I hear that power, it can make me raise a fist.”
JayVe Montgomery replies:
“Now is the only moment. As improvisers we engage the if in the middle of life, exhibiting to other humans our greatest shared instinct-improvisation. Playing freely with listening compassion; talking and listening all at once; we aim to exhibit democracy in a form truer that has yet to be seen in the governments of nations.”
Christiane Bopp concludes:
“Our music will be a weave of our imaginations made of threads of music with different colors. What is the weave? A flying carpet to take off, to travel together and to grow up. A music crossed by songs of birds, human songs, and our hopes for the future.”
The Bridge
Jazz – owing to its particular history – has always been an unmatched medium that allowed the sounds and music of different worlds to express themselves with passion and singularity, shaped by a musical art dedicated to collective invention and reinvention. Jazz was the original “world music,” long before this label became widespread.
In the recent years, after a century of stories and legends when every improviser, group, and scene grew ever more specific, many French and American musicians have expressed a renewed interest in experiencing the musical and socio-musical realities of their transatlantic counterparts. To really create mutual knowledge. But often with the regret that these adventures, swift to go “beyond expectations,” do not continue beyond a few concerts, a tour, or a recording, due to the lack of adequate structures.
The Bridge intends to form such a network for exchange, production, and diffusion, to build a transatlantic bridge that will be crossed on a regular basis by French and American musicians as part of collaborative projects. And, in addition to the scheduled projects, encourage meetings and relationships between creative musicians and perpetuate them. In other words: to give them the times and spaces to join and rejoin on both sides of the ocean and to deepen their exchanges.
About the musicians:
Dan Bitney is an experimental musician and composer based in Chicago. A multi-instrumentalist, Bitney works within avant-garde electronic, rock and improvisational groups, most notably Tortoise, Isotope 217 and Spectralina..
Christiane Bopp is a french trombone and sackbut player. She studied at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris . She's active since 1997 in early music ( La Fenice, René Jacobs, Il Giardino Armonico, Les Talens Lyriques). For a long time she has found in contemporary and creative music a privileged space for expression. She has played with french ensembles Ars Nova and Zellig and has taken part in several creations ( Martin Matalon, Marc André, Claude Barthélémy, Alexandros Markeas... ) She also played in the projects of Dominique Pifarély (Dédales), Marc Ducret (Real thing 3, Chronicles of the frozen sea) , Kent Carter (Oratorios). She currently performs in Joëlle Leandre's tentet « Can you hear me ? », also in trio with Sophia Domancich and Denis Charolles, in another trio with Hélène Breschand et Basile Chassaing, in a quartet with Benjamin Duboc, Sylvain Kassap, Toma Gouband. She improvised with Jean-Luc Cappozzo, Mat Maneri, Maggie Nicols, Dominique Pifarély, Joëlle Léandre, Jean-Marc Foussat. Her interest in interdisciplinarity led her to collaborate with poets during performances, notably with Valérie Rouzeau. She continues this dialogue with key works by creating projects such as the quartet Tenements of clover on the Bee in poems of Emily Dickinson, and the cine-concert « Meshes of Times » on Maya Deren's films, ( duo with musician and filmmaker Lucie Mousset ). She will play in 2019 (Chicago) with Dan Bitney, Rob Frye, JayVe Montgomery and Simon Sieger (The Bridge). She plays in the National Orchestra of Jazz (Fred Maurin)
Rob Frye was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri 1987 and grew up in St. Louis where he began playing guitar and saxophone. he moved to chicago in 2006 to attend DePaul University’s school of music where he graduated in 2010. since then he has pursued the muse of sound along with the rest of the artistic community embedded in Chicago, and alternated his summers between working as a field biologist for the institute for bird populations in California and as a counselor/resident artist for Chicago park district’s culture arts and nature programs (one summer with nature, and two with inferno mobile media and recording arts). “With synthesizer, flute, saxophone, clarinet, guitar and drum, Rob Frye from Chicago is present in the bands Bitchin Bajas, Cave, el is a sound of joy, and more. with his own project flux bikes, he also uses his bicycle as an instrument. the performance begins before the concert, riding to every appearance and continuing to experiment with dynamics, poly rhythms and loops. the tires tell of the journey between melody, noise and sound intervention. his collaborative trips range from the local to the international.” - Katharina Ritter
Of Jamaican and Louisiana Creole descent, JavVe Montgomery was born in Ft. Hood, Texas on the last day of 1979 and raised a dependent of the department of defense in Berlin, Germany, before and after the wall; Rayne, Louisiana, before the frogs left; Columbia, SC, home of the confederate flag; and Ft. Campbell, KY, home of the 101st Airborne Division. Montgomery received a double BA in Japanese Studies and Anthropology from Centre College of KY and has also studied sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is Senior Program Specialist for the Chicago Park District’s Inferno Mobile Recording Studio, a hip hop revitalization program. He is also a curator and artist-in-residence at Brown Rice, an art space for listening in Chicago, IL. Reconciling the past with the future, JayVe Montgomery’s work is time traveling to the pre(-)sent, the gift of now.His work reveals his adherence to improvisation and chance as a way to explore evolutionary learning and unintended subjective meaning through random being.
Born in 1986, Simon Sieger spent his early childhood in Briey-en-forêt (54). His father, a saxophonist and actor in the region's jazz and free jazz scene, taught him the basics of music and improvisation from the age of four. At the age of nine, Simon's parents moved to India and it was there that he completed his knowledge of jazz, classical and world music. Once the baccalaureate was in his pocket, Simon decided to try his luck in France. He landed in Marseille, where, playing the trombone under a highway, he was immediately hired by a French song group. He quickly met musicians from the Marseilles scene, notably Jean-Marc Montera and Ahmad Compaoré, during his musicology studies at the Faculty of Aix-Marseille. The decisive meeting will be with guitarist Thomas Weirich; together they will initiate more than a dozen projects, including the one that will lead to his first record on the Durance label, Themes et Variations. For ten years now, the two comrades have been exploring the wild territories of music. It was after this meeting that the two musicians decided to approach Raphaël Imbert. Charmed by their inventiveness and taste for all kinds of jazz and improvisation, he quickly made them join the Nine Spirit Company, where they now have a prominent place.Today, Simon Sieger is active as a musicology researcher (currently in doctoral studies under the direction of Christine Esclapez), jazz musician (with the Nine Spirit Company) and cultural pioneer in various and impromptu groups.