1709 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR 97214
TREVOR WATTS
The only founder member of The Spontaneous Music Ensemble still alive. He also founded Amalgam (which included Keith Rowe) and his 1980s Moire Music Group which included Veryan Weston & Peter Knight as well as Phil Minton/Pinise Saul/Lol Coxhill many more and The Drum Orchestra (1980-1997), which involved musicians mainly from Ghana (ECM 1449 CD “A Wider Embrace”). He instigated the 35 piece collaboration with the Drum Orchestra and Teatro Negro de Barlovento (Venezuela) which toured here and also in Venezuela in the 1990’s and around the World on every continent. Other prominent musicians he’s played with include Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, Steve Lacy, Kent Carter, Rashied Ali, Steve Swallow, Bobby Bradford, Cyro Baptista ,Stan Tracey and Veryan Weston.
Watts is featured in “Jazz Brittanica” (a BBC4 film on British jazz and improvised music, 2005. He is featured in many other films on jazz/improv music, some for ARTE TV including filming of two visits to the Roaring Hooves Festival.
Major Jazz Festival appearances include Womad, Glastonbury, San Francisco Jazz Festival, Monterey Jazz Festival, Freedom of the Plaza Festival July 4th in Washington DC, Singapore Arts Festival, Beijing & Shanghai Jazz Festivals, Berlin Jazz Fest, London Jazz Fest, Cervantino Festival, Mexico, New Zealand Festival of Arts, Wangaratta and Darling Harbour Festivals in Australia
Watts is listed in the Who’s Who in the World of Music dictionary.
JAMIE HARRIS
In 1999 JAMIE HARRIS organized a group made up of young musicians for a concert where Trevor Watts was musical director.This group continued to rehearse after that concert and it was during that first rehearsal with no drummer in attendance that Watts handed Harris a drum and asked him to bang it.The group eventually became “Trevor Watts and the Celebration Band”, where Harris served as percussionist. The Celebration Band toured USA / Canada as well as playing several concerts in the UK and Europe.In 2003 Watts and Harris began performing as a duo, taking this project to Mongolia, USA/Canada, Mexico, The Dominican Republic and Brazil among other locations. Since July 2021, Watts /Veryan Weston and Harris formed the group “Eternal Triangle”. Who have since played concerts all over the Uk and EU performing Trevor’s compositions In October 2022 he began improvising danceable funk jazz with Trevor Watts and Mark Hewins in the group JaMaTre
“Jamie vibrates, at the same time as our eardrums, with a virtuosity to make the most experienced Cuban congeros pale! “
Alain Fleche , French journalist
Mike Gamble / Logan Strosahl DUO
Mike Gamble
BIO
Mike Gamble is an adventurous guitarist and multi-instrumentalist whose work with electronic modes of composition are integrated endlessly into his setup. Gamble has spent the last 20 years immersed in the creative jazz, experimental rock and improvised music scene primarily in NYC, with close ties to New Orleans, Burlington, Boston, San Francisco and now the Pacific Northwest. He has had the pleasure of recording over 50 albums and has been touring the states, Canada, and Europe with his critically-acclaimed guitar trio The Inbetweens, Mike Gamble Solo,, and alongside doom-metal originators Earth. His more recent collaborators include Bobby Previte, Todd Sickafoose, Nels Cline, Wayne Horvitz, Esperanza Spalding, Matt Chamberlain and Lori Goldston.
Since relocating to Portland, Mike Gamble has dived into the jazz and experimental, Pop, Indie Rock, and electronic/modular scene and gigs 4-7 times a week. He currently holds a position as a Contemporary Music Industry instructor at Oregon State University, and a guitar teacher at both Willamette University and Reed College and is the Artistic Director of Portland’s long standing experimental music organization, The Creative Music Guild.
Quotes
“He has a brain that seems to work faster than other human brains – maybe more like a hummingbird or a spider. Music comes flying out. You just sit and listen to what he thinks of next” Todd Sickafoose
“Mike Gamble is dangerous in the best way” Nels Cline
“Mr. Gamble knows his way around a drone, but he also puts a lot of shifting harmony and texture in his one-man sketches, some of which — like “I’m on Your Side,” with its abstracted trip-hop beat — come across as thoughtfully developed compositions” Nate Chinen NY TIMES
WEBSITE:
Logan Strosahl
Born in Seattle, Washington, Logan Strosahl is a composer and performer creating genre-defying work that combines classical compositional soundworlds with the aesthetic outlook and improvisation of Jazz.
His most recent -and largest – work (released on September 3rd 2021), is a piece for chamber orchestra and soloist called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a translation of the the 14th-century Middle-English poem of the same name. Before that, he released four albums on Sunnyside Records:Up Go We (2015), Janus (2016), Book I of Arthur (2017), and Sure (2019), and you can find links to them below.
