Join a panel discussion with members of the creative music cooperative Catalytic Sound. Hosted by UC Santa Cruz ethnomusicology graduate student Brock Stuessi, in conversation with musicians Bonnie Jones, Luke Stewart, and Ken Vandermark.
"Improvising Collectivity" stems from the past two years of Stuessi's research of Catalytic Sound, a digital international cooperative of creative improvising musicians. The panel discussion is an opportunity for this research to engage with and reach the UCSC community and the general public through a channel beyond the written thesis. In bringing together various musicians who are involved with Catalytic Sound, Stuessi intends to demonstrate aspects of the ethnographic process.
FREE and open to the public
Register here
* * * * *
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Bonnie Jones is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and performer working with electronic sound and text. She performs solo and in numerous collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. Jones was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and is currently a member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, she co-founded TECHNE, an organization that introduces young female-identified women to technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. TECHNE’s programs are delivered through partnerships with grassroots organizations that share an aligned commitment to racial and gender equity. Born in South Korea, she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland, and Providence, Rhode Island, on the lands of the Susquehannock, Piscataway, Algonquian, and Narrangansett.
Luke Stewart is a Washington, DC- and New York City-based musician and organizer of important musical presentations, and has a strong presence in the national and international improvised music community. He was noted in Downbeat magazine in 2020 as one of the “25 most influential jazz artists” of his generation. Stewart has performed in and organized with a myriad of organizations such as Arts for Art, the Kitchen, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pioneer Works, Roulette, and Issue Project Room. His regular ensembles include Irreversible Entanglements, Heroes are Gang Leaders, and Ancestral Duo, Six Six, featuring guitarist Anthony Pirog, and experimental rock duo Blacks’ Myths. As a solo artist, he has compiled a series of improvisational sound structures for Upright Bass and Amplifier, utilizing the resonant qualities of the instrument to explore real-time harmonic and melodic possibilities.
Ken Vandermark (born 1964) moved to Chicago from Boston in 1989, and has worked continuously from the early 1990s onward, both as a performer and organizer in North America and Europe, recording in a large array of contexts, with many internationally renowned musicians. His current musical activity includes work with Marker, Made To Break, Lean Left, Shelter, The DKV Trio, The Eric Revis Quartet, VWCR, DEK, his large ensemble Entr'acte, and the ongoing Momentum projects, duos with Paal Nilssen-Love, Terrie Hessels, Mars Williams, and Nate Wooley, as well as work as a solo performer. In 2011, Vandermark founded Catalytic Sound, along with Mats Gustaffson, Paal Nilssen-Love, and Peter Brötzamnn. In addition to the tenor sax, he also plays the baritone saxophone, bass, and Bb clarinet.