May 25, 2009
8:00 and 9:30pm $25
Jason Mears - alto saxophone, clarinet
Kris Tiner - trumpet, flugelhorn
Ivan Johnson - contrabass
Paul Kikuchi - drums, percussion
The Empty Cage Quartet has consistently been praised as one of the most powerful and original new jazz groups to emerge from the American West Coast. For nearly seven years the group has explored imaginative new ways to integrate a diverse mix of musical influences ranging from shuffle swing to free jazz blowouts, minimalist percussion loops to complex modernist gestures, robotic grooves, odd-meter marches, heavy rock, and nearly everything in between. Performances of this music involve an elaborate system of on-stage cues to navigate the flow of improvisation in, around, and out of modular compositional structures designed to cycle, overlap, combine and recombine. The result is a continually evolving, multidimensional approach to jazz and new music performance, improvisational acuity, and compositional craft that Amazing Sounds Magazine has likened to an "urban folk music of the future." The Empty Cage Quartet has toured extensively in the Western United States and in Canada and Europe, and they have received support from the American Composers Forum, the International Society for Improvised Music (ISIM), and Chamber Music America’s French-American Jazz Exchange. To date they have released six CD recordings that have been featured on jazz radio stations around the world and reviewed favorably in publications including Signal to Noise, The Wire, All About Jazz, Cadence Magazine, Jazz Hot, Paris Transatlantic Magazine, LA Weekly, Tucson Weekly, and Stride Magazine. Stratostrophic, their most recent album, is out now on the Clean Feed record label.
www.emptycagequartet.com
OAKWOOD NUEMS QUINTET
The Nuems Quintet was formed in 2007 as a student ensemble at the Oakwood School in North Hollywood. Since then the group has premiered over 20 pieces written by composers from New York and Los Angeles. The group focuses on improvisation, while continuing to pursue new compositions that showcase their unique instrumentation and their ability to play in a very diverse range of styles.
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