UPCOMING :

PUBLIC WORKSHOP / EVENT

December 11, 2025

Illusions of Time

Finding your place in the challenge of continuity

Pheeroan akLaff 

Participants will engage with a purview of the social, political, and heightened sensitivity of jazz pedagogy, its impact, and meaning in American life. They will advance cognizance of pre-colonial and African diaspora art practices that fostered jazz as a response to Euro-centric performance art practices.

Workshop

This workshop is approximately 75 minutes in duration and is driven by the interaction of the participants. It will explore rhythm in music, poetry, and world events, as well as the impressions the cycles have on our immediate and recorded histories. We will listen to ancient sounds, modern sounds, and reflect upon their significance in our daily lives. We will engage in playful challenge and record our reactions to what is demanded of us in protocols. There is no need for musical training for these exercises. Our goal will be to gain a new perspective from an unexpected source and refresh our sense of curiosity.

Topics covered will include:
From Full Circle To Whole Cylinder 

Finding Voice Wrestling with Homeostasis
Shepherding the Metamorphosis
This will be followed by a solo by akLaff

The program is open to percussionists and non-percussionists and will also expose participants to discussions probing the spiritual, stylistic, political, and economic environments within 19th and 20th Century Jazz creators. Reference Authors may include Psyche Loui, Robert Palmer, Gary Giddins, Giovanni Rosellini, Jon Parales, Bill Cole, Ben Sidran, Oliver Sachs, Ingrid Monson, Stanley Crouch, Roger Riggins, Chip Stern, and Jose Arguelles, alongside Reference Musician Biographies such as Blind Tom, Willie Ruff, Thelonius Monk, Cannonball Adderley, Art Taylor, and Yusef Lateef.

Participants may be asked to bring a few simple materials to support the workshop activities, including a plastic bucket of any kind (preferably in the large Lowe’s, Home Depot, or joint-compound size), any colors of magic markers, and a notebook. A Swiss Army knife or screwdriver may also be brought if available, though it is not necessary.

THURSDAY, DEC 11, 2025
TIME 7-9PM
LOCATION Arts Letters & Numbers, 1548 Burden Lake Road, Averill Park, NY
ADMISSION Free to the public with suggested donation $20

Artist Bio

Pheeroan akLaff’s signature drumming with adventuresome composers has been voluminously documented. His studies with “Pistol” Allen (Motown) and Randall Hicks (NJSO), was broadened by living and working in Abidjan, Cote D’ivoire, with the African ballet company of Marie Rose Guiraud, and by meeting Fela Anikulapo Kuti, and Steve Rhodes in Lagos Nigeria. He participated in U.S. State Department tours of nine African nations, the Near East, and India. He has toured Japan and Korea with national treasure artist Yamashita Yosuke since 1988. He made groundbreaking collaborations with Oliver Lake, Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Davis, Henry Threadgill, Liu Sola, Tom Pierson, Andrew Hill, Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, and has interdisciplinary work with Dr. Psyche Loui and Dr. Julian F. Thayer. Through Seed Artists, a New York City and Montclair, New Jersey based non-profit, akLaff presents and expands the terrain of creative music. https://pheeroanaklaff.com/home

In collaboration with Arts Letters & Numbers

Images courtesy of Pheeroan akLaff. All rights reserved by the artist.

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PAST PERFORMANCES:

Improv Spaces Co-Directors Alex Chang and Adam Forman will be convening, performing and presenting at
the Global Performance and Sound Lab at Rutgers University-Newark and
New York University
on October 18-19, 2025

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Andrew Drury at the 2025 Improv Spaces Music Festival. Photo by Kylie Spinelli

Improv Spaces is thrilled to present the experimental sounds of the trio collective Andrew Drury (drums), Jill Burton (voice), and Chris Cochrane (guitar) for their Upstate New York tour and the Capital Region-based apostrophebeats for a special solo set at Mt Ida Preservation Hall.

Andrew Drury is a drummer, composer, improviser, presenter, organizer, and educator originally from Seattle. In addition to 20 years playing with Jason Kao Hwang and Ken Filiano he performs as a soloist, leads a quartet and tentet, and co-founded the cooperative percussion ensemble, The Forest. A mentee of Ed Blackwell for a decade he has performed and recorded with JD Parran, Alexis Marcelo, Frank Lacy, Myra Melford, Mark Dresser, Ingrid Laubrock, Tomeka Reid, Warren Smith, Kris Davis, John Tchicai, Wadada Leo Smith, and many more. In 2015 Drury founded the non-profit organization Continuum Culture & Arts to support the wide range of activities he and his colleagues are involved in, bringing world-class artists into historically marginalized communities across the US, facilitating international cultural exchange, documenting work via recordings, video, and an oral history archive, providing organizational assistance to artists via Continuum’s Incubation program. He also runs Soup & Sound, a performance series begun in his Brooklyn home in 2009. Drury has been called “one of the most adventurous drummer/percussionists in creative music today, and a dedicated humanitarian” by All About Jazz and the Jazz Journalists Association named him a “Jazz Hero” in 2023.

Jill Burton

“Jill Burton brings her voice and physical form as the two main tools of her trade. Her bio includes training in ballet and classical music at an early age, while having quickly developed an affinity for improvising in performance. Ms. Burton was a witness and participant in the profound cultural and interdisciplinary possibilities of the 1980s arts renaissance that blossomed out of the then near-apocalyptic urban collapse
and wholly non-commercial NYC/Lower East Side scene. While many musicians here for CM5 concerts come from that same NYC/LES arts scene, few could add something as inverted a seminal experience as Burton’s six years as musical accompanist for Pacific Northwestern Tlingit tribe storytellers in Sitka, Alaska. She has spent more than fifteen years studying and practicing non-invasive medical modalities including Reiki, Ortho-Bionomy and Sound Healing…Burton’s improvised works manifest most often in wordless vocals, seemingly constructing invisible sonic architecture, both bordering the interior of a venue and transforming those same borders into transducers carrying vibrations.” — Matt Gorney 

Chris Cochrane

Chris Cochrane is a Brooklyn-based musician, guitarist, improviser, noise maker, collaborator and composer. Chris has worked with many musicians including Zeena Parkins, Marc Ribot, John Zorn, Stew Stewart and Eszter Balint, Billy Martin and with countless other musicians since arriving full time in NYC, in 1982. He has performed at various International music Festivals as well. He has composed music for dance and theater for Ishmael Houston-Jones, Dennis Cooper, Nayland Blake, Neil Greenberg, and Circus Amok. He was in the bands No Safety and Curlew, and is currently works in several music projects that include musicians such as John Thayer, Shoko Nagai, Gordon Beeferman, Kevin Shea, Fast Forward, Gelsey Bell, Viv Corringham, Miguel Frasconi, Marlon Cherry, Sulynn Hago Hans Tammen, Kevin Bud Jones and Nick Didkovsky et el… 

apostrophebeats

“apostrophebeats” is the electronic music project of Capital Region artist Dan Paoletti. Encompassing eclectic influences into a bubbling cauldron of production tricks in order to create a sound entirely unique to this project, apostrophebeats – now in its 10th year – is a restless effluence of sound, combining strains of instrumental hiphop, funky free jazz, vaporwave, cybergrind, chiptune, experimental improvisation, and drum’n’bass with a heavy emphasis on erratic rhythms, chaotic samples, and spiky synths. Each performance is a unique semi-improvised re-interpretation utilizing recorded work from the project’s full lifespan and beyond. FFO: Flying Lotus, Orangey, James Ferraro, Death’s Dynamic Shroud,
Hudson Mohawke, Cornelius.

https://apostrophebeats.bandcamp.com/

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MATTHEW RYALS
djdrummernk

Join us for a special evening of immersive sound and light at Mt. Ida Preservation Hall with New York City-based Matt Ryals and Capital Region’s own djdrummernk.

As a synthesist and composer-improviser whose music delves into improvisation, real-time sound generation, cybernetics, chance operations, and archival experimentation, Matthew takes a highly tactile live approach to the modular synthesizer—much like an acoustic musician shaping sound, he manipulates electricity by constantly adjusting dials, switches, and patch points, allowing each performance to unfold spontaneously in the moment. He has performed his music internationally, including concerts in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Europe, and across North America

Described as “a sonic explorer on the frontier of experimental music” whose work is “a fascinating foray to the edges of generative music production” (Plastic Mag), Matthew’s music has been praised for its “full-blown cybernetic synth shocks and mirrors” that are “unabashedly confident” (Tabs Out) and for treating sounds “as if they were alive, breathing” to create something “truly immersive and unforgettable” (Beats Per Minute).

djdrummernk’s work is well known to the 518 and as an artist, musician and educator, his work spans a wide range of genres across a variety of projects ranging from jazz, electronic, experimental noise, and musical theater. Thanks to eclectic background, he has opened for an uncommonly diverse collection of artists, from Mobb Deep to the New York City Ballet.

collage by Eric Sorg

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WED. MARCH 12, 2025 @7PM!
RSVP!

Improv Spaces is thrilled to announce a special evening of improvisational music at Mt. Ida Preservation Hall on Wednesday, March 12, 2025 of Chris Jonas: Music from the Deserts with Chris Jonas, compositions, projected video, soprano and tenor saxophones; Thomas Heberer, cornet; Cyrus Campbell, acoustic bass; Andrew Drury, drums. Local Troy-based Beni Adam, the team of multi-talented improvisational musicians Adam Tinkle and Adam Elabd, will debut their acoustic and electric clarinet duo to open the evening.

Music from the Deserts is a project of Santa Fe-based composer/sax player Chris Jonas, featuring Thomas Heberer on cornet, bassist Cyrus Campbell and drummer Andrew Drury. Deserts explores music written in complete solitude during winter camping over three years during the Pandemic, created in Arizona’s Barry Goldwater Missile Range adjacent to the Trump Border Wall that cuts across Arizona’s granite Tinajas Altas. This collection of music is in the midst of touring worldwide in 2023-25. Jonas’s music contains some elements of jazz while mixing elements that are quirky, delicate, weirdly groovy, polyphonic, and a mixture of the disjointed and melodic. 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Chris Jonas, reeds, compositions, video 

Santa Fe-based Jonas has been a long time and very active artistic figure in the creative music world, working as a collaborator in video, conducting and performing with Anthony Braxton (with whom he has recorded dozens of albums, conducted orchestras, produced operas and large scale events, and toured extensively), Cecil Taylor (1996-98 as performer and musical director), William Parker (as a member of Little Huey 1992-2001), and touring across the EU as a member of the Anthony Braxton Saxophone Quartet in 2022, which was just released as a four record set Sax QT (Lorraine). He is currently working in the EU and US with an array of projects, including 2025 work with bassist Sylvia Bolognese with a 30 person creative orchestra in Pisa, tours with Desert project ensembles in Italy, Germany, UK and Sweden, with Myra Melford on a series of video and music pieces about painter Cy Twombly, and with Anthony Braxton in a variety of ensembles, including a concert at the Library of Congress March 8, 2025. He is co-founder of the Santa Fe-based multi arts non-profit, Little Globe (www.littleglobe.org) and won the United States Artists Award in 2009. www.chrisjonascreative.com 

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Jonas 

Thomas Heberer, cornet 

Time Out New York called him “an innovator,” the The Penguin Guide to Jazz “outstandingly gifted,” and pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach “our new trumpet genius.” Thomas Heberer, born 1965 in Schleswig, Germany, started playing the trumpet at age 11. From 1984 to 1987, he studied under Manfred Schoof at the Cologne University of Music. He has performed in 70 countries on 6 continents; was a lecturer at the the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts (1993-97); and can be heard on approximately 150 recordings. Honors include receiving the prestigious SWR Jazzpreis in 1990, and being awarded the Down Beat Critics Poll as a member of the ICP Orchestra in 2002. Wim Wenders’ feature-length dance movie Pina, winner of the 2011 European Film Award, includes music Thomas contributed to Ten Chi, a choreography by Pina Bausch. Besides his ongoing work with the ICP Orchestra, Heberer maintains a busy performance and recording schedule with numerous New York City based ensembles, among them the Nu Band, Remedy and the Angelica Sanchez nonet. www.thomasheberer.com 

Cyrus Campbell, acoustic bass 
Having moved to New York City late 2024, Cyrus has been New Mexico’s fastest rising performing artists, performing with many of the region’s greatest musicians, including Eddie Daniels, James Emery, Alex Murzyn, Donald Bailey, John Trentacosta, and many others. He has performed all over the US as well as the southwest region. 

Andrew Drury, drums 
There is no doubt that Andrew Drury is one of most innovative and bold drummers on the modern music scene. (Hrayr Attarian, All About Jazz). Andrew Drury is a drummer, improviser, composer, and bandleader as well as a presenter, producer, educator, and a pioneer of extended techniques for percussion. Rooted in a fascination for Jazz and African-diasporic creativity that began in childhood, and further inspired by a nearly decade-long mentorship with the drummer Ed Blackwell, Drury’s work is in the tradition of those who inspired him in that it doesn’t conform to fixed limitations and always explores the infinite. Originally from Seattle, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. Over the years he has had the pleasure of playing with great artists, well-known and obscure, including Christine Abdelnour, Kris Davis, Michel Doneda, Mark Dresser, Peter Evans, Satoko Fujii, Charles Gayle, Craig Harris, Wayne Horvitz, Earl Howard, Howard Johnson, Eyvind Kang, Mazen Kerbaj, Ku-umba Frank Lacy, Annea Lockwood, Jessica Lurie, Myra Melford, Butch Morris, Aruán Ortiz, Jay Rodriguez, Tomeka Reid, Stephanie Richards, Roswell Rudd, Elliott Sharp, Wally Shoup, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Swell, John Tchicai, Reggie Watts, Nate Wooley, and Jack Wright, to name a few. 

Adam Tinkle of Beni Adam.

Adam Elabd of Beni Adam.

Beni Adam (“human beings” in Arabic) is the new duo of neighbors and friends Adam Elabd and Adam Tinkle, centered on intimate conversational improvisational interplay between two clarinets and timbral exploration of the woodwind families and their electronic prostheses.

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Tuesday, December 25, 2025

This event is FREE for all to attend

Troy Savings Bank Music Hall is delighted to announce that Improv Spaces will be artists-in-residence and working on a collaborative incubator project with artists from the Capital region that will be workshopped with the public and then premiered at the Improv Spaces Music Festival.

Improv Spaces co-directors, harpist Alex Chang and percussionist Adam Forman, are a part of the Rock City Falls Trio (Alex Chang, harp; Jason Handron, double bass; and Adam Forman, drums) and will be working with multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Manuel J. Perez III to create a collaborative work-in-progress they hope to develop with participants from the Troy community. On Sunday, December 15th 2-4pm, the public is invited to bring their personal photos, sounds, objects and memories about the city to share at a community potluck at Mt. Ida Preservation Hall in Troy. The artists hope to incorporate our collective joys, trials, and experiences of the city into a music and visual art project. 

The incubator project will be presented as a live performance of the work-in-progress at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall on Tuesday, February 25th, 2025 at 7pm for feedback that will be open to the public. The piece will then debut at the 2025 Improv Spaces Music Festival on Saturday, June 7th at the Round Lake Auditorium.

About the Artists

The Rock City Falls Trio (Alex Chang, harp; Jason Handron, double bass; and Adam Forman, drums) is a cross-genre improvisation-based music ensemble based in the Capital Region. The trio often works with interdisciplinary collaborators including for their performances of EQUILIBRIUM. A collaborative improv with artist Christian A. Mendoza (2023) and WATER. A collaborative improv with artist Michael Miyahira aka Mike Ming (2024).

Alex Chang is an electric acoustic harpist and composer. Her musical practice finds its foundations in free jazz, indie rock, Celtic and new music, and her classical training. She explores entanglements and embodied practices through the concepts of free jazz and improvisation and the ways in which music moves through us and puts us in relation and dialogue with others. Her interest in collaborative practices attends to how improvisation opens up our sentience, our emotional and empathic relations around us and beyond as intertwined beings for connection and healing. Her work often focuses on the arts and environment and centering BIPOC communities. 

She is part of the Rock City Falls Trio, a cross-genre ensemble that often works interdisciplinarily through collaborative improvisation. WATER. A collaborative improv, which premiered at the 2024 Improv Spaces Music Festival, presented three movements performed by the improvisational trio featuring original themes composed by Chang. She recently completed a Jazz and Sonic Arts Music residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and premiered a new work Sharing a Woven Melody at the 2024 Gather Listen Hear Summer Arts Festival Jazz and Sonic Arts Concert. @alexachang2000

(Photo credit: Jessica Tomaselli)

Jason Handron (b.1995) is a composer and bassist from Albany, NY. He has been featured as both a composer and performer at events such as the soundSCAPE Festival (Maccagno, Italy) and the New Music Gathering (Boston, MA). He currently performs with the Rock City Falls trio and teaches private lessons in the NY Capital Region.

Jason holds a B.M. in Music Composition from the State University of New York at Fredonia and an M.M. in Music Composition from Bowling Green State University.

Adam Forman is a classically trained drummer/percussionist who has performed in a wide range of musical settings. He has worked with composer/director/multi- instrumentalist Joe Fee and innovative collective IKTUS Percussion. His deep focus on improvisational practice and sensibilities allows for inventive syntheses of his experiences in experimental musical performance, including his punk and indie-rock influenced work.

In addition, he has rich experience working in collaborative experimental performance and interdisciplinary practices with music, improvisation across genres, and with the administrative aspects of running musical spaces and the creative musical direction of ensembles. While a manager at the legendary Carroll Music studios in New York, he spent years organizing large scale orchestral concerts and Broadway productions as well as working closely with experimental chamber ensembles and touring bands.

He has significant performance experience including at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in Austin, Texas as a member of Talujon Percussion Quartet and with the Argento Chamber Ensemble, Fireworks Ensemble, and Greenwich Village Orchestra, as well as with the Manhattan Symphonie across China, and on large-scaled cruise ships and in theaters throughout New York City. He was also drummer for the bi-coastal band Butterscotch Stanley for more than a decade.

Recently he’s been exploring composing and rearranging music that would inspire unique, improvised-based performances. Adam’s arrangement of free jazz master Masahiko Togashi’s Pray was performed by the Rock City Falls Trio at their recent concert titled Equilibrium: a collaborative improv in September 2023.

(Photo credit: Jessica Tomaselli)

Manuel J. Perez III (any pronouns) is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, performer, improviser, and researcher based in the northeastern USA. Treating all media, processes, and actions as generative vehicles of expression, their artwork integrates disciplines such as performance art, free improvisation, experimental composition, collage, datamoshing, architecture, poetry, artificial intelligence, and more. Their works often foreground the lived histories of everyday people as a means to investigate how ways of becoming and knowing are enabled through performativity, sociality, self-expression, and spontaneous action. They believe deeply in the power of togetherness, and prioritize the creation of art that encourages the development of community, empathy, and understanding of oneself and others.

Their artistic work has been shared internationally within the bland white walls of institutions such as Istanbul Bilgi University, Technische Universität Berlin, and Wesleyan University. They are a member/close collaborator of multiple spontaneous performance collectives, series, and venues around the United States (Fort Point Free Music; Dino Crisis; Structure Affliction; Colbish Circle; Troy Speakeasy; etc.), and prioritize working closely with communities that are new to improvisation and performance. Manuel has collaborated with folks such as Tyshawn Sorey, Wadada Leo Smith, Chris Pitsiokos, Nat Baldwin, Marc Edwards, David Berhman, TAK Ensemble, SPLICE Ensemble, Paula Matthusen, and Michael Century. As Death Rattled, their visual and sonic collage art thrives within DIY spontaneous performance communities worldwide.

This program is made possible in part by generous support from The Arts Center of the Capital Region, National Endowment for the Arts & New York State.

Monday, December 2, 2024

AN ILL-FITTING GARMENT
— Album Release Tour
with Eli Wallace, Bill Harris,
Josh Berman and Ishmael Ali
& special opening performance by
Matt Weston

Location: Mt. Ida Preservation Hall
548 Congress St, Troy, NY
Time: 7:30pm-9:30pm/
Tickets on sale now! Eventbrite link: $20 suggested donation

Join us on the first stop of the album release tour of An Ill​-​Fitting Garment featuring Brooklyn and Chicago-based musicians Eli Wallace, piano; Bill Harris, drums; Josh Berman, cornet; and Ishmael Ali, cello. The evening will open with a special performance by Albany-based percussionist Matt Weston.

The music of Wallace, Harris, Berman and Ali underline improvisational collaboration, what might seem foreign and familiar, and how parts make a whole. 

After convening for a recording session at Marmalade Studios in Chicago, IL, in 2021, the improvising quartet continued to hone their collective sonic identity through regular live concerts in Chicago. As documented on their first cassette release, An Ill-Fitting Garment, the group focuses on acoustic interplay, resulting in music featuring acousmatic moments that obfuscate who makes which sound, blurring and bending rhythms and pitches into a syncretic whole. Wallace’s ability to cull variegated sounds from the prepared piano matches Harris’s percussive textures and unique rhythmic sensibility. Berman and Ali find common ground in pitched and harmonic material that can sometimes disperse into territories resembling synth and electronic sounds. All four musicians trade roles during their musical interactions, sometimes falling into the background while interjecting with aberrant melodic statements at other times. The group strives to create a unified heuristic sound that simultaneously features each individual while constantly generating a sense of rhythmic propulsion, at times subtle, at times bombastic. 

Albany-based percussionist Matt Weston will open the evening with a special solo performance.  Weston plays percussion and electronics, and has performed throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. A student of Arthur Brooks, Bill Dixon, and Milford Graves, Weston has also collaborated with Ilyas Ahmed, Bill Callahan/Smog, Kevin Drumm, Mary Halvorson, Jeff Parker, and many others. His recordings have been hailed by Vital Weekly as “some of the best modern music,” and his 2023 double LP Embrace This Twilight was chosen for Bandcamp’s year-end Best Experimental Music list.


Bandcamp Links:
https://bermanwallacealiharris.bandcamp.com/album/an-ill-fitting-garment
http://mattweston.bandcamp.com

Special thanks to Artist Pianos

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THANKS EVERYONE! For making The Long Jam a success!

More about INARA can be found here: www.inara.org

ARTIST BIOS

Max Caulkins 

Max Caulkins is a game developer and amateur music maker. When she isn’t pulling her hair out in front of a computer or complaining about animation pipelines, Max can be found performing around Troy and the surrounding area, either on sax or keys or some combination of the two, usually playing her strange brand of electroacoustic improv. With a mix of melodic playing and spacious effects, Max aims to create landscapes that listeners can meditate to and get lost in, drawing them into a story about a place that doesn’t exist.

Alex Chang

Alex Chang is an electric acoustic harpist and composer. Her musical practice finds its foundations in free jazz, indie rock, Celtic and new music, and her classical training. She explores entanglements and embodied practices through the concepts of free jazz and improvisation and the ways in which music moves through us and puts us in relation and dialogue with others. Her interest in collaborative practices attends to how improvisation opens up our sentience, our emotional and empathic relations around us and beyond as intertwined beings for connection and healing. Her work often focuses on the arts and environment and centering BIPOC communities. 

She is part of the Rock City Falls Trio, a cross-genre ensemble that often works interdisciplinarily through collaborative improvisation. She completed a Jazz and Sonic Arts Music residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and premiered a new work Sharing a Woven Melody at the 2024 Gather Listen Hear Summer Arts Festival Jazz and Sonic Arts Concert. @alexachang2000
(Photo credit: Jessica Tomaselli)

Adam Forman

Adam Forman is a classically trained drummer/percussionist who has performed in a wide range of musical settings. His deep focus on improvisational practice and sensibilities allows for inventive syntheses of his experiences in experimental musical performance, including his punk and indie-rock influenced work.

Recently he’s been exploring composing and arranging. Adam’s arrangement of free jazz master Masahiko Togashi’s Pray was performed by the Rock City Falls Trio at their recent concert titled Equilibrium: a collaborative improv in September 2023. (Photo credit: Jessica Tomaselli)

Jason Handron

Jason Handron (b.1995) is a composer and bassist from Albany, NY. He has been featured as both a composer and performer at events such as the soundSCAPE Festival (Maccagno, Italy) and the New Music Gathering (Boston, MA). He currently performs with the Rock City Falls trio and teaches private lessons in the NY Capital Region.

Jason holds a B.M. in Music Composition from the State University of New York at Fredonia and an M.M. in Music Composition from Bowling Green State University.

Jason King

Jason King, born and raised in Austin, Texas, from a lineage of musicians. He began playing guitar at age 11. He won local guitar contests between the ages of 15 to 17 resulting in a few televisions spots, radio play and interviews.

To further explore his interest in the vast landscape of sound Jason began building synthesizers and producing and mixing music. He plays a range of instruments, genres and styles. Among his primary influences are Aphex Twin, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Boards of Canada, Roy Buchanan and most music recorded between 1968 and 1990. Jason is also a conceptual artist, currently working on a series of 12 abstract paintings. He resides in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Nicholas Kopp / djdrummernk

Nicholas Kopp aka djdrummernk is an artist, musician and educator whose work spans a wide range of genres across a variety of projects ranging from jazz, electronic, experimental noise, and musical theater. Thanks to eclectic background, he has opened for an uncommonly diverse collection of artists, from Mobb Deep to the New York City Ballet.

Justin Holden

Justin is a guitarist/producer/engineer currently embracing the melting pot of group improvisational performance.

Eddie Jowels

Eddie Jowels is a composer, musician, and educator based in Albany. His 20 year career has taken him around the world and has engaged him with a wide variety of music-making, education, and collaboration.

Eddie regularly performs and teaches privately throughout the local and regional area, and is one half of an Albany-based improvisation duo called Pig Butchering.

Jaha Orande

Born in Harlem, New York, Jaha Orande discovered his passion for music at age five when he began playing the djembe. Having a mother who worked for a growing record label, Jaha always found himself immersed in music, often spending time consuming jazz at a local art gallery. Moving upstate shifted his focus a bit as he was fortunate enough to join a championship marching band and ensembles where he explored genres such as jazz and funk. This would ultimately influence his next chapter in life.

Jaha’s musical journey continued in Charleston, South Carolina, during college, where he personally explored a variety of world percussion styles, including Brazilian samba and Indian tabla while studying classical percussion technique under the instruction of Dr. Michael Haldeman. His time in Charleston was marked by collaborations with fellow musicians and performances at local venues.

With 25 years of experience, Jaha has developed a unique style that blends traditional techniques with contemporary influences. Deeply connected to his roots, Jaha continues to share his love for rhythm and inspire aspiring drummers, all while celebrating the rich musical heritage of his upbringing.

Satyrical One

Something of a modern renaissance man. By day I work in alternative education and tech repair, by night as a multimedia artist. My forays into music and electronics led me into the realm of video and glitch art; finding new (mis)uses for old tech, painting at 30 frames a second, with a determination to sync visuals to music as precisely as possible, and replicate synesthesia. I’m excited and honored collaborate with other artists, especially for humanitarian causes.

Adam Tinkle

Adam Tinkle is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and teacher residing in Troy NY. Committed above all to artistic community and collectivity, he once led an experimental children’s orchestra, has helped form numerous artist-run spaces, series and cooperatives, and, as a faculty member at Skidmore College, launched the Co-creation Initiative to forge networks of support between the school and justice-centering community efforts in the wider region. His current active musical projects include Sun Dogs (sci-fi spa-jazz), Seven Count (human-feel improv in thick electro-acoustic soundscapes), and Adam Tinkle and his Long-Awaited Wrinkle (troubador-esque songs in a nimble jazz-roots combo).

Matt Weston

Matt Weston plays percussion and electronics, and has performed throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. A student of Arthur Brooks, Bill Dixon, and Milford Graves, Weston has also collaborated with Ilyas Ahmed, Bill Callahan/Smog, Kevin Drumm, Mary Halvorson, Jeff Parker, and many others. His recordings have been hailed by Vital Weekly as “some of the best modern music,” and his 2023 double LP Embrace This Twilight was chosen for Bandcamp’s year-end Best Experimental Music list.

http://mattweston.bandcamp.com

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Improv Spaces @ Saratoga Arts presents

Jonathan Moritz and Mike Pride
SUMMERTIME
An outdoor performance celebrating the new album release

Sunday September 1, 2024
6:30pm-8pm
Location: Outdoor performance at Saratoga Arts Center
320 Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
Open to the public. Suggested donation of $10-$20 at the door.

FEATURING
Jonathan Mortiz – tenor and soprano saxophones
Mike Pride – drums, glockenspiel, marimba, autoharp, tenor saxophone

Jonathan Moritz and Mike Pride have been close collaborators for more than two decades and share a deep love for experimentation and free improvisation. Some of their notable past and current collaborations are Evil Eye (quartet with Nate Wooley and Ken Filiano), Secret Tempo Trio (trio with Shayna Dulberger), Mike Pride’s From Bacteria to Boys (quartet/quintet led by Mike Pride), and various projects led by Chris Welcome.

Their second duo release, SUMMERTIME (Neither / Nor Records 2024) is a truly unique amalgam of avant-garde jazz, lo-fi, sound collage, improv, field recording, with a touch of psychedelic production. 

The music is at once expansive, multifarious and deeply intimate. Much of the album was recorded outside. In Jonathan Moritz’s words: “The record is all improvised sax and drums duets that we recorded organically in 2020 and 2021 over weekends in Mike’s back yard, studio and near a stream during our family vacation in Maine. The laugher and screaming of our children, the stream gurgling, the splashes of rocks were not added afterwords but in the background during the recordings, an ode to our daily life. I feel this record is a culmination of our improvised, joyful adventures together.”

We are delighted to be able to experience their music live outdoors at Saratoga Arts.

ARTIST BIOS:

Mike Pride

Based out of New York City since 2000, Mike Pride currently performs solo, leads jazz quartet From Bacteria To Boys, the 7-drummer installation Drummer’s Corpse, the piano trio I Hate Work and his newest compositional workshop band, Tributary Trio. He is also co-leader the ensembles Pulverize The Sound (w/ Peter Evans and Tim Dahl), Three-Layer Cake (w/ Mike Watt & Brandon Seabrook) and Location Location Location (w/ Michael Formanek & Anthony Pirog). Pride is renowned for his ability to excel in a wide range of genres and ensembles. He has worked with everyone from improvised music icon Anthony Braxton to punk legends Millions Of Dead Cops, toured extensively on four continents, appeared on more than 150 recordings, and toured arenas worldwide opening for comedian Amy Schumer with Jason Stein’s Locksmith Isidore.

A short list of his collaborators includes Mick Barr, Tim Berne, Boredoms, Jaimie Branch Trio, Eugene Chadbourne, Nels Cline, Andrew D’Angelo, Trevor Dunn, Dynamite Club, Moppa Elliot, Charles Gayle, Milford Graves, Mary Halvorson, Curtis Hasselbring, Nona Hendryx, Jon Irabagon, Brad Jones, Haino Keiji, Kirk Knuffke, George Lewis, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Frank Lowe, Bill McHenry, Tony Malaby, Sam Mickens, Butch Morris, Joe Morris, William Parker, Marc Ribot, Matana Roberts, Herb Robertson, Jamie Saft, Sonny Simmons, Craig Wedren, Nate Wooley, Jack Wright, Katherine Young’s Pretty Monsters, Otomo Yoshihide and John Zorn.

Pride’s versatility doesn’t end with his eclectic résumé as a popular sideman and leader/co-leader of many active ensembles spanning the worlds of modern-jazz, avant-rock, noise and death free jazz. He is also a busy educator and clinician, a composer for

TV shows, video games, podcasts and websites, and an experienced visual artist.

Jonathan Moritz is a saxophonist and composer working in free improvisation and jazz basedin Brooklyn, NY. He pursued jazz saxophone studies at the RoyalConservatory of Brussels in Belgium, earned a BFA at the California Instituteof the Arts and a masters in music education from Brooklyn College. Movingto New York City he became a frequent collaborator with fellow improvisingmusicians, including Sean Ali, Carlo Costa, Shayna Dulberger, Ken Filiano,James Ilgenfritz, John McLellan, Mike Pride, Steve Swell, Chris Welcome, andNate Wooley.

Currently, Moritz is involved in various projects, such as Secret Tempo, his trio as a leader and composer, a duo collaboration with drummer Mike Pride, and is also a member of the collaborative improvising trio Moritz / Ali / Costa with Sean Ali and Carlo Costa.

Since 2004, Moritz has hosted the Prospect Series, an intimate Brooklyn house concert featuring innovative improvisers.

Check out the new album: https://neithernorrecords.bandcamp.com/album/summertime

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THURSDAY, July 18, 2024
IMPROV SPACES @ Saratoga Arts presents

fluxxbaby ‚girlflux EP‘ RELEASE TOUR
and DEATH RATTLED

THURSDAY, JULY 18, 2024 | 8PM-9:30PM
Location: Saratoga Arts, 320 Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY
Tickets on sale now! $10-25 sliding scale
(pay what you can to support the artists): https://www.saratoga-arts.org/event-5786538

Join us at the upstate NY stop for Zurich-based fluxxbaby’s ‚girlflux EP‘ release tour with Death Rattled, prolific Troy-based musician Manuel J. Perez III, presented by Improv Spaces at Saratoga Arts.

fluxx (she/her) has been focusing on her work as an electronic and improvising musician for several years. Her practice revolves around two intertwined approaches: solo production and collaborative improvisation. As a solo artist, she focuses on harsh sounds and deconstructed rhythms, capturing the abstraction, loneliness, and brutality of late capitalism in 2024 and shaping it into her own soundtrack. 

For the tape “girlflux EP,” set to be released in July 2024, fluxxbaby transformed her improvisational workflow into structured compositions. She worked with algorithmic rhythms, sampled prepared pianos and nature sounds, and pushing every sound through various digital machines and engines over and over, constructing and deconstructing, searching for rhythms, and ultimately finding flux. With a library of refined sounds, fluxxbaby steps out of her studio to once again push, pull and transform her sound, reconstruct the rhythms, searching flux and finding improvisation. 

Artist links:
https://www.instagram.com/luajungck/
https://soundcloud.com/luajungck

Death Rattled began out of a desire to explore the assembling, juxtaposition, and disfiguration of recognizable symbols. Their work explores this through multimedia and audiovisual mediums (e.g., digital collage, embodied performance, music genre mashups, music videos, soundscapes, sampling, etc.). DR is proudly anti-cop and anti-fascist.

Manuel J. Perez III, an interdisciplinary artist and experimental performer based out of the northeastern USA, began Death Rattled in 2019. Their artistic work has been shared internationally (Turkey, Germany, Canada, etc.) within the bland white walls of institutions such as Istanbul Bilgi University, TU-Berlin, and Wesleyan University, as well as within thriving DIY communities worldwide.

Death Rattled’s primary visual art practice began with digital collage using royalty-free images. Each work consists of images uploaded on royalty-free image websites that are disfigured through digital processing, specifically layering and filtering techniques. DR’s image sources now include large corporations, search engines, and other capitally-driven enterprises as a politically charged means towards reclamation. This process explores one way out of our perpetual commodification hellscape of capitalism by using reclaimed audiovisual media to make the old new again. This practice extends to the sonic, where sample & mashup culture blend with spontaneous creation in search of the boundaries between genre and symbol.

Artist links: 
https://vimeo.com/mjpiii (composition / performance documentation)
https://mjpiii.bandcamp.com (published discography)

Death Rattle releases:
https://mjpiii.bandcamp.com/album/coeldlgaepse
https://mjpiii.bandcamp.com/album/the-end-of-things
https://mjpiii.bandcamp.com/album/quiet-life

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SUNDAY, March 17th, 2024
IMPROV SPACES @ Saratoga Arts presents

EARTH TONGUES
“ANENOME” 
and SUN DOGS

Time: 5-7pm EST
Location: Saratoga Arts, 320 Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
Tickets: Sliding Scale $10-$25
RSVP HERE

View Livestream

The sea anemone dreamed of something,
filtering the sea water thru its body
— George Oppen’s Route

Join us on Sunday, March 17th with the New York-based ensemble Earth Tongues their Northeast Tour of their recently released album Anemone with Neither / Nor Records. The program will open with a special performance with local hosting artists Sun Dogs, the sci-fi jazz duo of Dominique Vuvan and Adam Tinkle. 

Earth Tongues is dedicated to exploring the scope and scale of experimental improvised music, and approaches each performance as a chance to build new, engaging work that questions our relationship to and understanding of music, sound, and noise. Consisting of Carlo Costa on percussion, Joe Moffett on trumpet, and Dan Peck on tuba, the trio creates pieces that explore dynamic, textural, and temporal extremes.

Anemone is the fourth album by Earth Tongues, following Atem (2019), Ohio (2016) and Rune (2015), all released on Neither/Nor Records. The recording captures a piece by the same name which was recorded outdoors in a backyard in Brooklyn. Anemone plays with the boundary between music and ambient noise, emphasizing the relationship between coalescence and juxtaposition, purposeful and accidental, foreground and background, transparency and opaqueness. The trio inhabits its surrounding environment: a micro ecosystem flourishes within a macro ecosystem. 

Artist Bios
EARTH TONGUES

Dan Peck is an experimental musician/tubist currently living in New York City. He is active as a sideman working regularly with projects led by Peter Evans, Tony Malaby, Anthony Braxton, Ingrid Laubrok, Nate Wooley, etc. He also performs contemporary music as a member of ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble) and leads the doom jazz trio The Gate (w/ bassist Tom Blancarte and drummer Brian Osborne) as well as a solo tuba project. In 2012 Dan founded the record label Tubapede on which he released his debut solo recording Solo Lp along with several other releases. Since 2017 Dan is the principal tubist of the New York City Ballet Orchestra.
danpeckmusic.com

Joe Moffett approaches his work with a keen interest in unconventional sounds and forms, collective improvisation, and the intersection of action and stillness. He is a co-founder of several projects, including ambient improv trio Earth Tongues and the duo Windscour with Zach Rowden, and a duo with Cecila Lopez, in addition to performing frequently as a solo artist. He has also performed works by other artists including Yoshi Wada, Tom Hamilton, Cecilia Lopez, Vinny Golia, Kevin Ramsay, and Sam Yulsman. His material appears on Neither/ Nor, Underwolf, Eh?, NotTwo, Tubapede and Prom Night Records.
www.joemoffettmusic.com

Percussionist and composer Carlo Costa, was born and grew up in Rome, Italy. Since 2005 he has been living in New York City where works as a leader or sideman of various projects. He currently leads or co-leads Diaphane (w/ Frantz Loriot, Raphael Loher and Carl Ludwig Hübsch), Earth Tongues (w/ Joe Moffett and Dan Peck), Moritz/Ali/ Costa (w/ Jonathan Moritz and Sean Ali), and various duos with Zosha Warpeha, Christoph Schiller, John McCowen and Philippe Lauzier. In addition Carlo performs solo percussion concerts and organizes a collective large ensemble called Living Sound Lab.
www.carlocostamusic.com

SUN DOGS

Dominique Vuvan and Adam Tinkle are like-minded sonic explorers who have long probed the outer reaches of music – Vuvan as a psychologist who studies the neuroscience of music, and Tinkle as a multi-instrumentalist and multimedia artist who studied with the likes of Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton and Anthony Davis, and has issued releases on experimental labels like Edgetone and Risky Forager. In the post-lockdown DIY renaissance of 2021, they began co-hosting a house concert series called ESP/Evoked Potentials, and it was at one of these house concerts that Sun Dogs recorded its debut album, The Solstice Concert, a semi-improvisational suite of soundscapes, harmonic territories and synthesizer textures, where hypnotic moon bells and spaceship sounds undergird the spirited test flights of flute, clarinet, and saxophone, and interpenetrate with Tinkle’s space-time-fractured field recordings. In the years since, they’ve shared regional stages with leading lights of cross-genre experimentalism like SUUNS and Medicine Singers, and expanded their sound palette – as the performance situation allows – to include all-acoustic meditations beside their electronic journeys. 

Earth Tongues
https://neithernorrecords.bandcamp.com
@earthtongues

Sun Dogs 
sundogsundogs.bandcamp.com
@sundogsundogs

www.saratoga-arts.org
@saratogaarts

IMPROV SPACES
We are a nonprofit located in the Saratoga/Capital region providing resources for new music and serving as a hub for a community of interdisciplinary collaborators.
www.improvspaces.org
@improvspaces