Tuesday October 15 – Naomi Moon Siegel & Marina Albero  / Illegal Son $15-30 8pm at No Fun

Trombonist and composer, Denzel Mendoza is Illegal Son. A Filipino National born in Singapore, raised in Las Vegas, NV; studied in NYC, NY, and based in Portland, OR; Mendoza has lived in the United States for the majority of his life but yet, he continues to chase the American Dream. 

Since 2004, Mendoza has been an Undocumented Immigrant. Labeled as illegal, criminal, and unwanted, Mendoza unwillingly carried that shame as a child into his years as a young adult to only then embrace those terms as strengths as the years progressed. Ironically, his achievements as a musician have outweighed his path towards citizenship; from performing nationwide with Haley Heynderickx to being awarded at The Grammy Awards for his participation with John Daversa’s American Dreamers: Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom in 2018.

Denzel Mendoza’s Illegal Son is quite simply his interpretation of life as Undocumented Immigrant through sound and music. It is deeply emotional and incredibly vulnerable. Every passing day, there is no promise of a tomorrow; there is only fear and hope. To process life under the umbrella of being Undocumented consists of improvisation, a consistent chaos of what’s to come. Everything within Illegal Son is improvisation. It’s insecure, unstable, but hopeful.

An award-winning trombonist, improviser, composer, and educator, Naomi Moon Siegel uses the trombone as a vehicle for sonic expression colored by breath, spit, and physicality. Moving beyond conventional genre norms, she allows her lyrical sound to unfurl intuitively. Her original musical vocabulary draws on the richness of a variety of global musical traditions and the sonorities of the natural world. 

Siegel is touring in support of the release of her third album Shatter The Glass Sanctuary, a collection of adventurous original works that chronicles her adjustment to small-town living in Missoula, Montana, after residing for many years in Seattle, Washington. The music follows her inward journey of emotional highs and lows, propelled ever forward by a stellar sextet of acclaimed Seattle musicians including pianist Marina Albero, guitarist Andy Coe, percussionist Christopher Icasiano, trumpeter Ray Larsen, and bassist Kelsey Mines. Produced by award-winning drummer and mentor Allison Miller, Shatter The Glass Sanctuary is Siegel’s most ambitious and sweeping statement yet, and a showcase of her prowess as a composer, improviser, bandleader, and trombonist. For this tour, Siegel will be joined by the prolific pianist Marina Albero, for a stripped-down intimate version of this music. 

naomimoonsiegel.com

https://www.youtube.com/@naomimoonsiegel

Marina Albero is decidedly one of the rarest improvisational artists of our time. It’s relevant in the human experience today because what reflects an awakened emotional soundscape as she engages you. It’s movement that is necessary yet strikingly a familiarity we have forgotten. The complexity of the sounds out of every key has not one identity but multiple characteristics in relation to another, it leaves you wondering what is even happening and in what genre you are listening to anymore.

marinaalbero.net

Jenny Scheinman, acclaimed violinist and composer, a stalwart of the New York jazz and creative music scenes, presents music from her newest album All Species Parade, an epic double-album celebrating the Pacific Northwest wilderness, where Scheinman was raised.

Jenny Scheinman is an acclaimed violinist and composer who spent 13 years on the NYC downtown music scene, leading both her own bands, as well as working alongside artists ranging from Jason Moran to Brian Blade, Lucinda Williams to Lou Reed, among numerous others. The New York Times praised her “distinctive vision of American music, suffused with plainspoken beauty and fortified by country, gospel, and melting-pot folk, along with jazz and the blues.” Upon moving back to the Pacific Northwest, Scheinman was reawakened to the extraordinary biodiversity of the region known as “The Lost Coast,” where she was raised, a stretch of mud-slide- and earthquake-prone coastline cut off from the main thoroughfares. This would ultimately inspire Scheinman to write All Species Parade, an epic and sprawling double album with an A-list ensemble, featuring guitarists Bill Frisell, Julian Lage and Nels Cline, pianist Carmen Staaf, bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen. Though the album does evoke a sense of pastoral wonder, it also strives to capture in Jenny’s words, “a charged relationship to nature, a feeling of being part of something bigger than ourselves, powerful, and fragile, and constantly changing. Something alive. With All Species Parade, I set out to musically reflect that experience of awe.”

JENNY SCHEINMAN

In addition to her extensive work in jazz and improvised music with Jason Moran, Brian Blade, Ron Miles and Allison Miller and many more, Jenny Scheinman has toured and recorded with songwriting legends such as Lucinda Williams, Bruce Cockburn, Robbie Fulks, Rodney Crowell, Lou Reed, Ani DiFranco and Joni Mitchell. She is featured on the original cast recording of Anais Mitchell’s hit musical Hadestown, and has written several feature length movie scores, including the forthcoming Avenue Of The Giants. In March 2015 she premiered a multimedia performance at Duke University entitled Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait, which she continues to present in theaters around the country. On October 11 she will release her eleventh studio album All Species Parade as an epic double-vinyl celebration of wild biodiversity, featuring lifelong cohorts Carmen Staaf, Tony Scherr, Kenny Wollesen and the extraordinary guitarists Bill Frisell, Julian Lage and Nels Cline. 

PRESS QUOTES

“Scheinman [is] a meticulous interpreter of emotion and a composer of cinematic vision and scope.” – DownBeat

“Jenny Scheinman leads an electrifying group of musicians…there is an emotional element to her playing that makes her music deeply satisfying.” – Wall Street Journal

“…when [Scheinman] cocks her fiddle to her chin, draws back her bow, and starts shredding along with her excellent bandmates the result is beautiful havoc unleashed.” – New York Magazine

“Scheinman [has] a distinctive vision of American music, suffused with plainspoken beauty and fortified … by country, gospel, and melting-pot folk, along with jazz and the blues.” – The New York Times

“Protean musician Jenny Scheinman plays all the positions: She’s a stellar violinist, a keen improviser, a sharp composer, and an appealing singer.” – Time Out NY

“There is a simple, quiet joy to this music. The honesty and passion with which it is played is infectious.” – Huffington Post

Electric Circus remixes classic soul and rock for the 21st century with sampled grooves, improvised sonic exploration, light projections and reinventions of mid 20th century psychedelia. Featuring 14 of Portland’s finest musicians (a veritable who’s who of jazz masters) and led by Seattle’s great Wayne Horvitz (conduction, sampling, keys) this show has special written all over it . 

Max Jaffe expands the boundaries of possibility for composition and collaboration through the drum set. His music draws from many different genres and seeks to break down the boundaries between them. He is part of a cutting edge of drummers that have embraced SUNHOUSE and their Sensory Percussion technology that has shifted the paradigm of the instrument. His powerful solo performances exploit the physicality of the drums to create narrative through movement, defying visual expectations and logic for what a “drum solo” can express.

As a collaborator, he is a longtime member of experimental rock collective JOBS and was a founding member of Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones, Leverage Models, and several other groups. He has toured with EDEN, Chrome Sparks, Steph Richards, Peter Evans, Rubblebucket, Delicate Steve, Cass McCombs, Oberhofer, Ava Mendoza, and many others. He has performed at a diverse range of festivals including Moers Festival, Big Ears, Panorama NYC, Berlin Jazz Festival, Movement Detroit, Vision Fest, and more. He holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and was a 2021 Pioneer Works Music Resident.

https://www.maxjaffedrums.com

In February 2023, the day after saxophonist Zoh Amba and drummer Chris Corsano finished up a duo tour of the west coast they entered the studio with guitarist Bill Orcutt. From this session came an album released summer 2023 called The Flower School. Chris and Bill are decades long collaborators perpetually adapting, adjusting, and challenging one another so that every performance by their duo seems to spring from a different inspirational source, but this was the first time Orcutt and Amba had ever played together. Through the recording session it is obvious that the level of communication and rapport between the trio feels eternal. 

This performance will be the West coast premiere of the trio of Zoh Amba, Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt performing music from their new LP “The Flower School.”

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One of experimental music’s most influential guitarists, Bill Orcutt weaves looping melodic lines and angular attack into a dense, fissured landscape of American primitivism, outsider jazz, and a stripped-down re-envisioning of the possibilities of the guitar. Whether he’s playing his decrepit Kay acoustic or gutted electric Telecaster (both stripped of two of their strings, as has been Orcutt’s custom since 1985), Orcutt’s jagged sound is utterly unique and instantly recognizable, and is compared with equal frequency to avant-garde composers and rural bluesmen. The New York Times has called him a “powerful musician… a go-for-broke guitar improviser,” and described his sound as “articulated sprays of arpeggiated chords and dissonance.”

Zoh Amba is a composer and instrumentalist from Tennessee residing in New York. Her music blends avant-garde, noise, and devotional hymns.  Before studying music at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music, New England Conservatory and studying with David Murray in New York, she spent most of her time writing and practicing saxophone in a remote forest near her home alone where she started to develop her distinct sound and approach. Today, her powerfully unique avant-garde music is full of folk melodies, mesmerizing refrains, and repeated incantations. Amba released her first two records in 2022. Her debut record O, Sun which was produced by John Zorn and released on his prestigious label Tzadik. Zoh Amba’s second record, Bhakti features Micah Thomas, Tyshawn Sorey, and Matt Hollenberg. Bhakti has become the moniker for Amba’s ongoing live and recording ensemble project with ever changing members, Amba also has a regular band with musicians Shahzad Ishmaily, Jim White (Dirty Three), and Steve Gunn.

Chris Corsano is a drummer who has been working at the intersections of free improvisation, avant-rock, and experimental music since the late ’90s. He’s a rim-batterer of choice for some of the greatest contemporary purveyors of “jazz” (Joe McPhee, Paul Flaherty, Mette Rasmussen) and “rock” (Sir Richard Bishop, Bill Orcutt, Jim O’Rourke), as well as artists beyond categorization (Björk for her Volta album and world tour, Michael Flower, Okkyung Lee). Appearing on over 150 albums and touring in an ultra-wide array of collaborations, Corsano has developed a highly personal musical language through ecstatic free improvisation, extended percussion techniques, and an innovative approach to the drum kit that includes resonating drum heads with bowed strings and circular-breathed reeds. He’s been called “one of the world’s great drummers” by The Guardian, “a peripatetic ace of the avant-garde” by The New York Times, and “arguably the most riotously energetic and creative drummer in contemporary free jazz” by Wire Magazine.

TWANS

Welded from the fruits of their own labors, TWANS set out to dispel current myths, question ideologies and sardonically allude to artistic nuances one would commonly dismiss. Between the three entities that are Mike Lockwood (drums), Andrew Jones (bass), and Mike Gamble (gtr) there exists an unyielding desire to connect in another dimension and utilize that interplay to heighten the worth of their songs.

https://twansmusic.bandcamp.com