The first annual IMPROV SPACES Music Festival kicks off tonight with an improvisation between beloved local artist/musicians Joseph Bruchac (Native flute) and Steve Candlen (Urdu drum) opening the festival!

Musicians Joseph Bruchac and Steve Candlen will open the festival.

The local Rock City Falls Trio will also be performing this evening with a new work “WATER. a collaborative improv” with visual artist Michael Miyahira (aka Mike Ming) performing live action painting.

Michael Miyahira, 2024, untitled WIP, sharpie on gessoed canvas, 16 x 20 inches.

Water. a collaborative improv evolved through an interdisciplinary dialogue — viewing, speaking, listening, experimenting — between the musicians and artist during the period of half a year, including at the Improv Spaces residency at Saratoga Arts this year. Together, they thought about ideas on their relationships to water through different textures, moods, shapes, drips, lines, and sounds. The resulting sonic and visual interplay becomes a collaborative mode of storytelling and expression within an intimate personal framework that also touches on larger collective lenses of pollution, climate crisis, and extreme events. 

The Rock City Falls Trio at The Barn at Rock City Falls.

The trio will improvise and build together from the first movement based off a theme Typhoon and glide through the second and third movements — Caverns and Cascades and Rain — shifting back and forth among ideas of water as power, violence, and chaos, to delicate echoes, mystery, and necessity, into hopes for the future of our waters.

Miyahira was a member of the New York-Tokyo artist collective The Barnstormers and is known for his large-scale drip paintings that pay homage to water and the sea. The painter’s interest in the ocean stems from his surfing practice and his lifelong proximity to the water and the performance will involve large-scale action painting by Miyahira with the trio’s collaborative musical dialog.

Hope to see you at the festival!

Get tickets to the festival! FREE TO THE PUBLIC: https://improvspaces.wordpress.com/2024-improv-spaces-music-festival/