Friday, May 17th Adriana Wagner and Charlie Brown III, Chris Lock, Nicole McCabe Solo at Portland Arts Collective

Charlie Brown III
Instagram @browncharlie3
A Portland native, Charlie Brown III is a musical director, producer, and keyboardist whose work has gained international renown in recent years. Brown has gained wider exposure when producing for mainstream rap artist, Aminé, and has since become a fixture in the tight-knit live unit supporting Memphis-based bass guitar prodigy, MonoNeon. Pushing the boundaries of jazz and new music, Brown does so with a unique knack for both composition and improvisation in the studio. He has produced and directed for regional artists such as Reva Devito and Blossom and currently splits time between Portland and the international touring circuit.

Nicole McCabe Music
Instagram @nicolemccabe_
Nicole McCabe is an alto saxophonist, composer and educator from Marin County, California who works and lives in Los Angeles. A rising star in the city’s interdisciplinary scenes, she recently released Mosaic, her fourth album as a bandleader, on Ghost Note Records. The LP follows Landscapes on the Spanish label Fresh Sound and her 2020 debut Introducing Nicole McCabe on Minaret. What Is My Porpoise?, the latest album from her electro-jazz duo with bassist and partner Logan Kane, is forthcoming on Dox.
Mosaic, executive produced by Jeff Parker, showcases McCabe’s complex tone and expanding structural sensibility in a post-bop tradition that she plies with studied creative verve and surprise. To record these through-composed works, she formed a new band featuring Kane, drummer Tim Angulo and pianist Julius Rodriguez, with appearances by Jon Hatamiya on trombone, Aaron Janik on trumpet and Parker on guitar. The album features music that McCabe wrote during Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead residency at the Kennedy Center under the tutelage of Jason Moran, as well as that workshopped with mentor Patrice Rushen for the Los Angeles Jazz Society’s New Note Jazz Award.
McCabe has otherwise performed or recorded with Ari Hoenig, Dan Weiss, David Binney, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Gerald Clayton, Sasha Berliner, Genevieve Artadi, Dave Harrington, and 10.4 Rog, to name a few. Frequent collaborators Louis Cole and Justin Brown appear on Dolphin Hyperspace’s new album. McCabe’s constellation grew further with a 2023 residency at Los Angeles improvised music hub ETA in its final months, and she is a regular presence at Altamira Sound, where she recorded Mosaic and 2022’s Improvisations, a solo work for saxophone and pedals. Earlier this year, Fresh Sound released McCabe’s Live at Jamboree, a performance in Barcelona with Kane, Iannis Obiols and Ramon Prats.
A teacher since high school, McCabe is currently an educator and jazz ensemble director at Loyola Marymount University and a mentor in California State University, Northridge’s Jazz Studies program. She also teaches at Los Angeles public schools through the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz program Jazz in the Classroom. She earned a Master’s from University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies at Portland State University.

Christopher Lock (https://lock-music.com) is a computer musician, creative programmer, classically trained violist and film composer currently based in Brooklyn, NY. He creates densely textural electronic music which slowly mutates and morphs over time and is often saturated with abstract imagery of the natural world and biological phantasmagoria. His unique musical practice is a synthesis of traditions ranging from Baltimore area noise and experimental music, where he first started working with sound, to his background as a classically trained Violist.
Throughout his education Christopher has been fortunate to study with such musical visionaries as Esperanza Spalding, Meredith Monk, Vijay Iyer, Claire Chase, Thomas Dolby, Chaya Czernowin, Hans Tutschku.
Christopher has released his music on labels such as Beautiful Machines (MA), Ex_Log Records (Bay Area), Protomaterial Records (Spain), Geryon (NYC) and Idolatrous Records (NYC). He has worked with world renowned ensembles such as Ensemble Recherche, Tak Ensemble, Ensemble WasteLAnd, Ensemble Zone Experimentale, Schallfeld Ensemble, Switch~ Ensemble, Elision Ensemble, Line Upon Line, and Wet Ink.
Christopher’s recent creative activities range from solo concerts to large scale collaborations across multiple disciplines. In Fall of 2023 he was a collaborator on the Organology project with Jessica Shand and Manuel Cherep (both graduate students under Tod Machover, MIT Opera Of The Future), which premiered at the MIT Media Lab. This project used bio-data from sensors attached to the performers in order to control synthesizers in Max/MSP. The team used incoming streams of data from multiple healthcare devices including a breathing band, heart monitor, body temperature thermometer, etc to control audio parameters within our software and to inform the overall contour of the piece.
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Christopher is currently a Ph.D candidate in Music (with supporting courses in Computer Science) at Harvard University. His dissertation, “Resonant Simulacra: Building Artificially Intelligent Instruments and a Portfolio of Cybernetic Compositions” documents the development and implementation of his recent techno-musical endeavors. He holds a Master’s Degree in Music from Harvard, a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Music from Johns Hopkins University (Peabody Conservatory), and a second Bachelor’s degree in viola performance (also from Hopkins).

Adriana Wagner is an up-and-coming trombonist and composer based in Portland, Oregon.
Wagner earned her Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies at Portland State University, studying with George Colligan and Darrell Grant. She formed her quartet in 2022 and has since been featured as an emerging bandleader in festivals such as the PDX Jazz Festival, Vancouver Wine & Jazz Festival, Creative Music Guild Festival, and Seaside Jazz and Blues Festival. Her original compositions weave styles together forming a unique sound under a decided jazz banner, submerging the listener in visionary storytelling. As a performer, Wagner uses lyrical elements to create melodies combined with a soft, rich tone that can resonate above or become immersed within the composition’s harmonic structures.
She was selected for the Young Jazz Composers program in 2021, highlighted by an in-depth
article from Oregon Arts Watch. Wagner was recently named one of the inaugural recipients of the Music Oregon Echo Fund grant to help create her debut album. Her album “She Sleeps, She Wakes” was released on PJCE Records featuring her original compositions. The album was recently featured on Best Jazz on Bandcamp 2024. Wagner has immersed herself in the Portland scene, performing in genres ranging from Salsa music to Big Band to Pop with artists such as Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, Brown Branch Big Band, George Colligan, Domo Branch, Lily Sheers, Nicole McCabe, Pleasure, PDX Jazz Presents: The American Refrain, Cambalache Orquestra and Pura Vida Orquestra.