Thursday May 10 8pm, $5 donation much appreciated
Dionyso McDonas Duo: [France, Olympia WA]
Arrington de Dionyso – bass clarinet
Thollem McDonas – keyboard
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Frenette Lipson Nystrom Wright Quartet: [Philadelphia PA, New York City, Boston]
Jack Wright – reeds
Kevin Frenette – guitar
Evan Lipson – double bass
Johan Nystrom – drums
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Lak Pensado Wright Trio: [Salem MA, Lowell]
Andrea Pensado – laptop, voice
Stephanie Lak – electronics, voice
Walter Wright – electronics, drums
NEW MUSIC WITH ATTITUDE, NO HOLDS BARRED!
Arrington de Dionyso makes trans-utopian world music for a world that exists in fever dreams and hallucinations. Using performance and visual art, he traverses the nameless territories held between surrealist automatism, shamanic seance, and the folk imagery of rock and roll. Ecstasy vs Madness. Arrington tours constantly, and has also presented workshops on improvising with the voice throughout North America, Europe, Israel and SE Asia.
Evan Lipson, bass, draws on his varied experience as a performer to create imaginative free improvisation. Evan has performed in a variety of alternative ensembles. His improvisation credentials include participation in the NoNet Festival and performing with Stuart Dempster, Andy Hayleck, Matthias Kaul, Stanley Schumacher, Todd Whitman, Nate Wooley, Jack Wright, and many others. Evan has received both the American Composers Forum SUBITO grant and Meet the Composer’s Creative Connections grant. He studied string bass with Michael Formanek and Robert Kesselman and attended Peabody Conservatory and Temple University.
Thollem McDonas pianist and improviser, was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area of Irish and Cherokee descent. Not long after birth he began studying the keyboard repertoire from the medieval to the 20th century. After graduating with degrees in both piano performance and composition he dedicated his time for years in grassroots political movements and ecological restoration projects before coming back to music with his full focus. He is currently touring perpetually, as a soloist and in collaboration with many other individuals and groups.
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, and in London, UK.
Andrea Pensado works with sound as a performer, composer and teacher. She has been using digital media and live interactive musical systems since 1995. She studied in Argentina and Poland. At first, she composed mainly for acoustic instruments. However, she gradually felt more attracted by different sound realms. Today, the abrasive digital noise of her improvisations is far away from her earlier pieces. Harsh dense layers of sounds, often interwoven with her voice, combine hybrid synthesis and sampling techniques to create a highly personal sound language, which reflects an intuitive, emotional and paradoxically also logical approach to music making. She lives in Salem MA.
Jack Wright: After teaching at Temple University in the 1960s and leaving academia in the early 1970s to engage in radical politics and community organizing, by the late 1970s Wright directed his energies into music. He is one of a very small group of musicians in North America that has played improvised music exclusively since the 1970s. Through years of near constant touring, often performing for audiences in cities and towns where improvised music had never before been heard, he came to be regarded as something of an underground legend. He has deliberately eschewed the conventions and socio-aesthetic limitations of musical careerism to pursue his own vision. Although his de-professionalized approach sets him apart from most musicians at his level of accomplishment, his art has always grown, expanded, and synthesized new information. He is unquestionably an original and virtuosic saxophonist, a master improviser who is deeply lyrical, with humor never far away. Wright tours frequently in Europe and North America (and in Japan in 2006), making new musical and human connections, bringing European musicians to the U.S. and bringing musicians everywhere together. He has made over 40 recordings (many published on his own Spring Garden label), performed in over 20 countries, and written extensively and insightfully about music and society for journals such as Improjazz (France) and Signal to Noise (US), as well as his own website.
