Join us on Sunday May 6th for an incredible night of music + poetry!
8pm on Sunday 5/6
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St.
Albany, NY
Jack Wright, alto and soprano saxes, Easton PA
Evan Lipson, double bass, Brooklyn
Johan Nystrom, drums, Philadelphia
Michael Peters will also be reading poetry.
Jack Wright was a soprano choir boy and a marching band saxophonist in the fifties, a bluegrass washtub bassist in the early sixties, a university lecturer in history, and a revolutionist in the late sixties and seventies. Since then he has been playing freely improvised saxophone, touring the US and Europe, and has been dubbed "the Johnny Appleseed of Improvised Music". He is accused of impersonating pigs, ducks and human blowhards, but lately has been remembering the proper use of the saxophone --to support the tottering universe. His roots are in Philly, where he owns a house for wayward improvisers (Johan Nystrom is one of them and Evan used to be). Jack plays with everyone but performs and tours only with the finest, which usually means the most obscure, from Europe and the US. He and his partners are among the few true believers in absolutely free, unrestrained, unstructured, unselfconscious improvisation, played at soberingly high levels of musicianship. www.springgardenmusic.com
Evan Lipson (b. 1981) has been active as a bassist, composer, and improviser since adolescence, now living in Brooklyn. From Philly (like a great portion of the best musicians). In an on-going pursuit of all things occult and aberrant, Lipson acquired an early interest in the latral realms of visionary & experimental music -- quickly seeking to transcend the existent paradigms of idiomatic expression. This particular 'left-hand path' has afforded him the opportunity to work in a wide variety of contexts and styles (esoteric and otherwise); his formative experiences being primarily rooted in modernist composition, underground rock, jazz, outsider pop, noise, as well as various modes of improvisation.
Johan Nystrom is a drummer working with sound and things he finds on the street. Activities since 2005 include playing high concept composition in a large orchestra for pirate TV, gamelan, amplified food, and countless free improvisation solos and groups. He has developed a range of extended percussion techniques that have more to do with electro acoustic and microtonal musics than paradiddles, but he refuses to relinquish the musicality of simple sticks and skins. Rather than dissociate these two elements, he plays a traditional kit but with a jerky, polyphonic fluidity to move as if he played a pitched instrument: the drum is a voice. He has been active on the East Coast, USA (Pittsburgh to Philly) and in London, U.K.
