Joe McPhee

8:00 PM; $5 - $15 sliding scale suggested donation at the door. This concert is presented as part of a nation-wide celebration of the 30th anniversary of The Improvisor magazine, the international journal of free improvisation.

Free jazz legend Joe McPhee plays a very rare Seattle solo show dedicated to the memory of two recently departed giants of the music, Bill Dixon and Fred Anderson.

Since his emergence on the creative jazz and new music scene in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Joe McPhee has been a deeply emotional composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a thoughtful conceptualist and theoretician. He first began playing the trumpet at age eight, and in 1968 took up the saxophone. Since then has investigated a wide range of instruments (including pocket trumpet, clarinet, valve trombone, and piano), with active involvement in both acoustic and electronic music. He is especially notable as a pioneering practitioner of solo free improvisation.

With a career now spanning over 37 years and more than 60 recordings, Joe McPhee has shown that emotional content and theoretical underpinnings are thoroughly compatible — and in fact, a critically important pairing — in the world of creative improvised music. His first recordings as leader appeared on the CjR label, founded in 1969 by painter (and now Seattle resident) Craig Johnson. By 1974, Swiss entrepreneur Werner X. Uehlinger had become aware of McPhee’s recordings and formed the Hat Hut label as a vehicle to release McPhee’s work. As the 1980s began, McPhee met composer, accordionist, and educator Pauline Oliveros, whose theories of “deep listening” strengthened his interests in extended instrumental and electronic techniques. During the 1990’s he finally began to attract wider attention from the North American creative jazz community. He has since performed and recorded prodigiously as both leader and collaborator, appearing on such labels as CIMP, Okkadisk, Music & Arts, Victo, Cadence, and Hatology. His most recent group is Trio X with bassist Dominic Duval and drummer Jay Rosen.

World Listening Day

In honor of the first World Listening Day, the Seattle Phonographers Union invites the public to participate in a series of soundwalks on Sunday, July 18th at Seattle's Green Lake. This event is FREE to the public; all are welcome.

Throughout the day, SPU members will guide participants on silent walks around the lake, focusing attention on the diversity and complexity of the local soundscape.

Walks start near the boat house at the south end of Green Lake (5900 West Green Lake Way N, 98103), and will commence at 10 AM, Noon, 2 PM, and 4 PM. Each walk will begin with a brief introduction to basic principles of Acoustic Ecology and intentional listening, and will conclude with an opportunity for participants to discuss their experience.

World Listening Day celebrates the practice of intentional listening as it relates to the world around us, environmental awareness, and Acoustic Ecology. It is organized by the World Listening Project (WLP), a not-for-profit organization devoted to understanding the world and its natural environment, societies, and cultures through the practices of listening and field recording.

The Seattle Phonographers Union is a collective of artists from various disciplines who record and present the sounds of the world in concerts, radio programs, CDs, and other events. Our goal is to move beyond our habitual experience of sound, exploring the ways in which we recognize, differentiate, map, and navigate the sonic environment.

Robert Rich

Ambient music pioneer Robert Rich performs in support of his new album, Ylang, using live electronics with analog modular synthesizer, keyboards and computer, along with his signature handmade flutes and steel guitar to create a hypnotic, atmospheric blend of composition and improvisation.

Robert Rich began building his own analog synthesizers when he was 13 years old. Across three decades and over 30 albums, he has helped define the genres of ambient music, dark-ambient, tribal and trance. He has performed in caves, cathedrals, planetaria, art galleries and concert halls throughout Europe and North America. His all-night Sleep Concerts, first performed in 1982, became legendary in the San Francisco area, culminating in the 7-hour audio-only DVD Somnium, a studio distillation of the Sleep Concert experience and possibly the longest continuous piece of music ever released at the time. Rich has designed sounds for television, film scores, and video installations, and works closely with electronic instrument manufacturers. He has written software for composers who work in just intonation, and his sound design has filled preset libraries of Emu’s Proteus 3 and Morpheus, Seer Systems’ Reality, sampling disks Things that Go Bump in the Night, ACID Loop Library Liquid Planet, WayOutWare’s TimewARP2600, and synths by Camel Audio.

Dana Reason + Llisa Miller: Piano Solos

Dana Reason is a leading figure in the new generation of pianists who are equally comfortable on both the jazz and classical concert stages. Born in Toronto, she began studying piano at age three. She was a member of The Space Between, with Pauline Oliveros (accordion) and Philip Gelb (shakuhachi). She has worked with bassists Lisle Ellis, Barre Phillips, Jöelle Léandre, Peter Kowald, and Matthew Sperry, as well as saxophonist Joe McPhee, trombonist George Lewis, and saxophonist Jon Raskin. She currently leads a trio with bassist Dominic Duvall and drummer Tim DuRoche.

Sharing the evening is Vancouver pianist Lisa Miller. Her work combines jazz, modern composition, and free improvisation in a vibrant and challenging context. She performs with Eyvind Kang, Dylan van der Schyff, Peggy Lee, Jeremy Berkman, Jesse Zubot, Ron Samworth, Alita Dupary, Steve Smith, the NOW Orchestra, ion zoo, and stop time.

Jessika Kenney & Friends

Jessika Kenney is well known to Seattle audiences as a long-time member of Gamelan Pacifica and Seattle Harmonic Voices. For this concert she performs with violist Eyvind Kang, Iranian tar player and vocalist Parvaneh Daneshvar, and jazz pianist Dawn Clement to play original poly-modal compositions and improvisations with a spirituo-linguistic relationship to Classical Persian poetry.

Jessika Kenney is a vocalist and composer based on Vashon Island. Her work demonstrates a deep appreciation and understanding of both traditional musics and experimental methods. She has performed and recorded classical Persian vocal repertoire with ney master Ostad Hossein Omoumi, new and traditional Javanese music with Gamelan Pacifica and Gamelan Madu Sari, overtone singing with Seattle Harmonic Choir, and the music of contemporary composers such as John Cage, Hans Eisler, Lou Harrison, Eyvind Kang, and Tadao Sawai. Her teachers include the jazz vocalist Jay Clayton at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and Nyi Supadmi in Central Java, Indonesia, where she studied traditional Javanese vocal music and collaborated on music and theater in experimental settings. She currently teaches voice at Cornish College of the Arts, where she completed her music degree in 2007. Her recordings can be found on the Endless, Haft Dastgah, Ipecac, Koto World, Mimicry, Present Sounds, and Tzadik labels, and include The Stonehouse Songs with Jarrad Powell, the voice/viola duet Aestuarium with Eyvind Kang, and Voices of Spring with the Hossein Omoumi Ensemble. She has created numerous experimental wayang (shadow plays) including Maya in the Bardo (1996), and Atria (2006), as well as many other works for voice and mixed ensembles.

Anna Homler & Friends

Presented by Nonsequitur & Seattle Occultural Music.

Los Angeles vocalist Anna Homler sings in alternative languages that extend the possibilities of meaning and communication with a sensibility that is both ancient and post-modern, blurring the line between words and music. Tonight she is joined by some of Seattle's finest experimental musicians: Amy Denio, Lori Goldston, Byron Au Yong, Doug Haire, and Susie Kozawa.

Since 1982 Anna Homler has performed throughout Europe and the USA, collaborating with composers and musicians Steve Moshier, David Moss, Steve Roden, David Moss, Viola Kramer, Voices of Kwahn, Axel Otto, Frank Schulte, Geert Waegerman and Pavel Fajt, among many others. As a visual artist, her ongoing performance/installation Pharmacia Poetica examines the symbolic and tonal qualities of words and objects. She is presently recording a new album with Seattle musicians as part of an Artist Assistance residency at Jack Straw Productions.

Shelley Hirsch

Shelley Hirsch is an unorthodox, extraordinary fusion of vocalist, composer, and performance artist whose work encompasses story telling, staged performances, compositions, improvisations, collaborations, installations, and radio plays. Among other things, she'll be singing over electronic "song drapes" composed for her by the late, great Jerry Hunt.

Born and based in New York City, Shelley Hirsch has performed hundreds of concerts of improvised music with great musicians including Anthony Coleman, Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, Hans Reichel, David Simons, Paul Lovens, David Watson, Marina Rosenfeld, Jim Staley, DJ Olive, Joey Baron, Mark Dresser, Ned Rothenberg, Marc Ribot, Cyro Baptista, Butch Morris, Elliot Sharp, and many others. Her mostly solo multimedia performance pieces have been performed internationally, and include O Little Town of East New York, For Jerry (virtual duets with Jerry Hunt), and The Passions of Natasha, Nokiko, Nina, Nicole and Norma (with visual artist Barbara Bloom). She is currently a vocalist in Alvin Curran's Philharmonie with Fred Frith, Joan Jeanrenaud, and Willie Winant.