Friday, December 17, 2021
7:30pm CT
Streaming on Twitch
FREE, $5+ suggested donation (100% goes to the artists)

This is the third in a series of four concerts Rhizome DC has presented this Fall as part of Janel Leppin's performance residency. Each show features new compositions for her group Ensemble Volcanic Ash featuring: Luke Stewart (bass) / Brian Settles (sax) / Anthony Pirog (guitar) / Kim Sator (harp) / Sarah Hughes (sax) / Larry Fergusen (drums) / Janel Leppin (cello, compositions). Opening up tonight will be Synthador. Broadcast live from Rhizome DC.

Artist Lineup + Set Times

7:30pm CT - Synthador

8pm - Janel Leppin’s Ensemble Volcanic Ash

Artist Bios

Synthador is an analog warrior in a digital world, a musical practitioner of lucha libre from parts unknown, whose mysterious past is the prologue to a sound as unique as its creator. Like the style of wrestling that inspired his secret identity, Synthador’s music is characterized by a mix of high-flying athleticism and chill-out rest-holds.

https://synthador.bandcamp.com/

“On a really good night, it only takes seven people on a stage to make you feel impossibly hopeful for the other 7.8 billion or so on Earth. Like on Saturday night at Rhizome, where Janel Leppin’s Ensemble Volcanic Ash created a 30-minute jazzlike surge that embodied all the complexity and grace of human cooperation — that intuitive, empathetic, semi-telepathic teamwork thing that helps set us apart as a species.

As a cellist and a composer, Leppin has been leading this revolving-cast ensemble for years, but its current iteration includes the most exciting musicians in D.C.’s jazz and improvised music scene: bassist Luke Stewart, saxophonists Sarah Hughes and Brian Settles, guitarist Anthony Pirog, harpist Kim Sator and drummer Larry Ferguson. Each player has their own distinct touch, and inside Leppin’s compositions, the collective seemed to be approaching maximum sensitivity, generating momentum without grandeur, cultivating intimacy without sentimentality.

Everyone on the bandstand clearly wanted everyone else to be heard. Stewart is one of the community’s most reliable mainstays (he plays in Irreversible Entanglements, Blacks’ Myths and other pathfinding groups), and his stout bass lines provided the steppingstones in Leppin’s music. The saxophonists were an astonishing pair: Hughes’s inquisitive phrases seemed to ask questions of Settles’s monumental tone. Ferguson was precise on his drums and dashing on his cymbals — the sound a typewriter might make if it could shimmer. On the harp, Sator spoke in euphoric glissandi and thoughtful pinpricks, while Pirog’s wobbling guitar tone replied in playful smears.

Leppin sat at the center of it all, physically and sonically, maintaining an imposing posture over her cello, as if literally trying to wrestle new sounds out of it. The plunging groans she summoned from her strings felt like an invitation to sink deeper into the music, and whenever Leppin threw her head back toward her bandmates, she didn’t seem to be signaling changes so much as expressing her approval of where everything was going.

And everything was going great. Here were seven very different people making those differences work together — true model-of-utopia stuff, especially in the concert’s hushed denouement, when the division of labor finally got a little smudged. Where were those music-box twinkles coming from? Pirog’s guitar or Sator’s harp? And was that soft-focus circular melody coming from Hughes’s saxophone or Leppin’s cello? After a half-hour of speaking to one another, the players now seemed to be speaking for one another, establishing an equanimity that no one individual could take credit for.

In that delicate, group-mind moment, it was easy to think about the fate of our big, dumb species; how human cooperation, even on a planetary scale, will depend on listening; and how so vast an undertaking might start on a humble Saturday night like this.”

-Chris Richards, The Washington Post

https://janelleppin.com/