This week, ESS presents the next Edible Audible Picnic–a series of free noontime concerts held each Monday in the Pritzker Pavilion. The four pieces in the program are a sonic exploration of hypnosis and disorientation, enveloping listeners beneath the extraordinary Pritzker Pavilion sound system. Bring a snack, stretch out in the grass and enjoy. Our 70-minute presentation includes:

“Stamen’s Patch” by Noé Cuellar.  Featuring Ian Hatcher, Jeff Gburek, Rebecca Bach, Martin Taxt and Eric Leonardson. 2009

“Spurious Landscapes” by Clauraudant, a collaboration between Stephen Hastings-King and Brett Ian Balogh. Audio mix by Todd Carter. 2007

“Hypnosis” by The Glowbug Theatre of the Air, a collaboration between Mark Booth, Audrey Colby, Ken Thompson, Lou Mallozzi, Shanna Linn and Lisa Kucharski. 1996

“rain 1.4″ by Lou Mallozzi. 2005

The Edible Audible Picnic happens in the Pritzker Pavilion each Monday at noon throughout the summer. 201 E. Randolph, 312-742-1168.

June 28
2pm

Dave Rempis
Dave Rempis began his musical studies at the age of 8, inspired by a family friend who played clarinet in local Greek bands, and by Zoot, of the Muppets Band, to pick up saxophone. In 1993, Rempis began a degree in classical saxophone at Northwestern University with Frederick Hemke. Finding this environment stifling, Rempis quickly ditched the music degree to pursue studies in anthropology and ethnomusicology. As part of these studies, he spent a year at the International Centre for African Music and Dance at the University of Ghana, Legon, studying African music and ethnomusicology. He continued to perform with many different types of groups, ranging from highlife and reggae bands while in Ghana, to jazz, free jazz, funk and contemporary music ensembles at home.

In March of 1998 was asked to join the well-known Chicago jazz outfit The Vandermark Five. The majority of his work nowadays is done with the many Chicago-based groups that he currently leads or collaborates with. These include The Rempis Percussion Quartet, The Engines, The Outskirts, The Rempis/Daisy Duo, Bishop/Rempis/Kessler/Zerang, and Wheelhouse. Past working groups include Triage, and the Dave Rempis Quartet. Rempis also performs and tours with Ken Vandermark’s Territory Band and Resonance Project, and The Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten Quintet.

From 2002 - 2005, Rempis curated a weekly Thursday-night concert series in conjunction with the Elastic Arts Foundation at their “3030” performance space in Humboldt Park. In the spring of 2006, he moved the series to EAF’s new Logan Square space, Elastic, where it continues today. In late 2005, Rempis helped form the presenters’ collective Umbrella Music, working with musicians and presenters from around Chicago to provide better playing opportunities for creative and improvising musicians. To learn more, visit his website.

$10 suggested donation, $7 students and ESS members. All proceeds benefit ESS.

UPCOMING

July 12: Tim Daisy – drums

photo by Carl Wiedemann

Zac Whittenburg of Trailerpilot says, “Stridulate had birthed some interesting and unique material; what’s notable about its premiere is how beautifully each of these environments have found their place in the work, complementing one another in an arc that feels full and complete.”

Stridulate plays this weekend at The Galaxie
2603 W. Barry
773.267.6010
June 12 & 13, 19 &20
Fridays: 8pm Saturdays: 4 and 8pm
$15

Flutist, bandleader, composer and educator Mitchell has been noted as “a compelling improviser of wit, determination, positivity, and tremendous talent…on her way to becoming one of the greatest living flutists in jazz,” (Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader). Mitchell placed first as Downbeat magazine’s “Rising Star Flutist 2005-2008, was awarded “Jazz Flutist of the Year 2008″ by the Jazz Journalist Association and ““Chicagoan of the Year 2006” by the Chicago Tribune. The founder of the critically acclaimed Black Earth Ensemble and Black Earth Strings, Mitchell’s compositions reach across sound worlds, integrating new ideas with moments in the legacy of jazz, gospel, pop, and African percussion to create a fascinating synthesis of “postmodern jazz.”

Recent highlights for Mitchell include a commission from the Chicago Cultural Center and the Jazz Institute of Chicago for Black Earth Orchestra and premiere of Many Paths to the Sea: A Tribute to Alice Coltrane; a chamber orchestra commission/premiere from Downtown Sound Gallery (Chicago) for Qualities of My Father, a tribute to Mitchell’s father; the commission/premiere of Xenogenesis Suite, an award winning sci-fi writer and Afrofuturist, Octavia Butler by Chamber Music America (through the generous support of Doris Duke Foundation); a premiere of new music for award-winning poet Haki R. Madhubuti and the founding of new projects including the Nicole Mitchell Quartet, and Sonic Projections. Mitchell currently directs the Wheaton Jazz Ensemble at Wheaton College and teaches jazz history at University of Illinois, Chicago. To learn more, visit her website.

$10 suggested donation, $7 students and ESS members. All proceeds benefit ESS.

UPCOMING

July 12: Tim Daisy – drums

ESS is pleased to host an hour of music with Chicago jazz legend Ken Vandermark. This is a rare opportunity to hear McArthur Fellow and former Tribune Chicagoan of the Year in the Arts Vandermark play solo in our intimate, inviting studio. We hope you can join us for this very special performance.

Since moving to Chicago from Boston in 1989, Ken Vandermark has played and recorded in a variety of contexts, and with many internationally renowned musicians. Past groups of significance include the NRG Ensemble, the DKV Trio, AALY, FME, the Vandermark Quartet, Spaceways Inc., School Days, Cinghiale, Steam and Caffeine. Currently, the majority of his work as a composer and improviser has been directed toward the Vandermark 5, Powerhouse Sound, the Frame Quartet, the Territory Band, Free Fall and the Resonance Ensemble. In addition, he performs on a regular basis with the total improvisation units Sonore, the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, separate duos with the percussionists Paal Nilssen-Love and Tim Daisy, Lean Left, and iTi. In December of 2008 he recorded his first soundtrack, for the documentary film, “Roads of Water,” directed by Augusto Contento.

Ken has made many significant and highly respected contributions to both the local and international jazz/improvised music scenes through organizing concerts in Chicago and sponsoring North American tours with various ensembles. In 1996, he and writer John Corbett began organizing the Empty Bottle “Wednesday Night Jazz Series,” concerts that brought musicians from Chicago, North America and Europe to audiences on a weekly basis for nearly a decade. From April 2006 to October 2008, he continued this work by co-directing the “Immediate Sound Series” with Mitch Cocanig at the Hideout; and since the autumn of 2005 he has been a member of Umbrella Music, a musician based group of organizers collaborating in Chicago, which is currently preparing its fourth intercontinental music festival for Jazz and Improvised Music. To learn more, visit his website.

$10 suggested donation, $7 students and ESS members. All proceeds benefit ESS.

UPCOMING

June 14: Nicole Mitchell – flute

June 28: Dave Rempis – saxophones

July 12: Tim Daisy – drums

Opening reception: May 15, 6 - 9pm.  Special guest performance by Guillermo Gregorio at 7.

Throughout his career as an artist, Fred Holland has been unflinching in his confrontation of political and social themes. Yet, as strong as the polemics that he engages may be, it’s his commitment to material and form that makes his work stand out from practitioners of so-called “political art.” When one encounters the immediate topical ironies in his work, the reaction is not “I get it,” but rather “Now where’s he taking me?” The result is that although his initial message may be clear, it’s the viewer’s physical encounter with the work that drives the iconoclastic subject matter even deeper both into one’s consciousness and into the less dialectical recesses of the psyche.

Golden Splinters is an attempt to illuminate the artist’s perceptions of a broken healthcare system. The ineffectual crutch stands as a metaphor for the larger failings of a country that views health care as privilege instead of a basic human right, and where a medical event can lead to bankruptcy and ruin.

Fredrick Holland
Fred Holland was born in Chicago and raised in the Rogers Park neighborhood. He attended the University of Illinois Chicago campus and graduated in 1976 with a B.A. in Design. He has exhibited in both commercial and non-profit galleries in Chicago, New York and Seattle since 1978 and has received grants from both the Illinois Art Council and the City of Chicago. He has been employed as a taxi driver, tile setter, carpenter, plasterer, bartender, house painter and has been teaching in the First Year Program at the School of the Art Institute since 1995. His life and work have been aided and inspired by his partner of 30 years Lois Grimm.

Golden Splinters was curated by Lou Mallozzi for Audible Gallery at ESS.

JULIA MILLER: leave(leaf)/believe: A Meditation on the Complex Intersection between Emotions, Reason, and Faith

May 9 – August 31, 2009
Opening reception: Saturday, May 9, 3-5pm

When entering the Fern Room of the Lincoln Park Conservatory, you hear leave(leaf)/believe: A Meditation on the Complex Intersection between Emotions, Reason, and Faith—a sound work by Chicago composer Julia Miller, and the next installation in ESS’s ongoing Florasonic series. The composition is an amalgamation of words, voice and electronic sounds.

Miller began the auditory project with text; she combined names of common weeds with other poetic language, then used a mathematical text organization method called mesostics—a system developed by the American composer John Cage—to extract words, phrases and syllables. Then, through various types of sound synthesis, she created accompanying “pitch clouds” that are produced in specific locations throughout the Fern Room by means of four-channel playback. These electronic sound compositions are like shifting fields in which the transformed words float and interact, evoking complex emotional and metaphysical experiences.

Lincoln Park Conservatory
2391 N. Stockton Dr
Open daily 9am - 5pm
Free

Chicago anti-cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm is known for working with a wide variety of musicians in as many situations as possible. On May 3, however, Fred will give a solo one-hour benefit performance in the ESS studio space. We hope you can join us for an intimate performance by one of Chicago’s most versatile musicians.

Fred Lonberg-Holm’s current and ongoing projects include the Valentine Trio, the Peter Brotzmann Chicago Tentet, Frame Quartet and Vandermark 5, Survival Unit III, Friction Brothers, The Boxhead Ensemble, Horses Ha, Fast Citizens as well as his Lightbox Orchestra and solo projects and numerous ad-hoc groups. He has performed throughout Europe and North America and has recorded for a diverse array of labels including Hat-Art, Emanem, Skin Graft, Nonesuch and Flyingaspidistra. In addition to composing and performing he has made a number of sound installations including recently at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, Joymore and Geschiedle Galleries. To learn more visit his website and MySpace page.

UPCOMING

May 17: Tim Kinsella – guitar and voice

June 7: Ken Vandermark – reeds

June 14: Nicole Mitchell – flute

June 28: Dave Rempis – saxophones

July 12: Tim Daisy – drums

Former Chicagoan Lynn Book has a vibrant stream of interdisciplinary artistic practice that traverses boundaries between performance art, dance, theater, language and new music forms. She deploys what she calls ‘voiced bodies’ wherein a new indeterminacy is at play, challenging the stability of order, destabilizing conventions of the word, singing, meaning and becoming. Lynn uses tactics that plumb the distances between impulse, image and utterance, often driven by writing that becomes physical, voicing that becomes textural and the immediate and unpredictable springs forth making possible new assemblages of desire in the making. 

Lynn Book (Winston-Salem, NC) is a performance artist whose work has received citations, fellowships and awards from the Franklin Furnace Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts among others. She has performed across the U.S. including: Roulette, the Knitting Factory and the Kitchen, NY, Cleveland Performance Art Festival, OH, University of Houston, TX, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, NC, and in Marseilles, Berlin, Vienna and across Europe. The Chicago Sun Times recognized Lynn as a “lodestar of the Chicago performance scene for 13 years” upon her premier of “Mercuria” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1997. She has enjoyed a long and fruitful association with ESS since its inception in 1986, recording material for her performances and then serving on the board from 1990-95 before relocating to New York. She is currently Visiting Associate Professor in Theatre and Dance and Program Director for Creativity and Innovation at Wake Forest University. She is also a founding faculty member with the Transart Institute, an international low-residency MFA program in new media based in Europe. To learn more, visit her website: www.lynnbook.com

UPCOMING

May 3: Fred Lonberg-Holm - cello

May 17: Tim Kinsella – guitar and voice