2022 CATALYTIC SOUND FESTIVAL
Two days of improvised performance featuring some of DC's most forward-thinking musicians alongside stellar representatives of various East Coast communities.
Part of the month-long international Catalytic Sound Festival.
Saturday December 3 :: 5-10pm :: TICKETS // livestream tix
Marcia Bassett + Samara Lubelski
Bonnie Jones + Luke Stewart
Joe Morris
Dave Ballou + Mike Kuhl
Sarah Hughes
Sunday December 4 :: 5-10pm :: TICKETS // livestream tix
Mutual Aid Music [Nate Wooley / Joshua Modney / Lester St. Louis / Luke Stewart]
Chris Corsano
Sam Newsome
Janel & Anthony
No Trick Pony [Amy K Bormet / Brian Settles / Keith Butler Jr.]
Catalytic Sound is a music based co-operative designed to help create economic sustainability for its artists through patron support.
Made possible by a grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
Poster by Nate Scheible.
Trumpeter/Composer Dave Ballou can be heard in a variety of settings; from solo trumpet improvisations to large ensembles. His recordings can be found on the Steeplechase, CleanFeed and pfMentum record labels. Ballou has performed or recorded with Rabih Abou-Kahlil, Steely Dan, Michael Formanek, Mary Halvorson, Woody Herman, Andrew Hill, John Hollenbeck, Sheila Jordan, Oliver Lake, Dave Liebman, Dewey Redman, Maria Schneider and Gunther Schuller.
His compositions have been performed and recorded by the Meridian Arts Ensemble, Trumpeter Jon Nelson, French hornist Adam Unsworth, Saxophonist Ellery Eskelin and the TILT Brass Ensemble.
Ballou is a Professor of Music at Towson University and is the founding director of Murray Jazz Residency.
MARCIA BASSETT (guitar) and SAMARA LUBELSKI (violin) first performed as a duo, improvising musical scores to films by Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton at the X-Initiative, Next Years Model series at DIA, 2009. Since their initial collaboration, Bassett and Lubelski have continued to draw from their like-minded approach to improvisational music; creating personal interplay with the environmental surroundings to expand on abstraction, chromatic noise, and long form drone.
Both Bassett and Lubelski have extensive backgrounds in the East Coast /NYC sub-underground. Bassett has performed in assorted and acclaimed experimental music projects over the last fifteen-years, including Un, GHQ, Hototogisu, Double Leopards and her solo project Zaimph. Lubelski is best known as a solo artist with ten full-length releases, but she has also been involved in various art-music provocations; Hall of Fame, Tower Recordings, as a member of Thurston Moore’s band, and in her associations with the long-standing German collective Metabolismus. As a duo these two players are capable of escalating sound and space into a single expansion of thundering waves and in single moment seamlessly release it all into threads of phosphoresce sound.
Amy K Bormet is a pianist, vocalist, and composer, known for her fearless free-wheeling style and dedication to creating new music. To collaborate with and celebrate women musicians, she started the annual Washington Women in Jazz Festival in 2011, directing, financing, and performing in an annual festival and women-focused events throughout the year in the DC area.
She has formed several ensembles to perform and record her compositions. Los Angeles-based quintet, AmyAna, co-led with Brazilian drummer Ana Barreiro, released their debut album in 2019. The Harold Trio, an instant composition ensemble with Tina Raymond, drums and Biggi Vinkeloe, saxophone/flute, released their second album, Open Secrets, in 2019. Her quintet, Ephemera, a project of women’s poetry and improvisation, performed a two-week tour of Sweden.
Amy’s recordings are available through Strange Woman Records, which she co-owns with guitarist/producer and husband Dr. Matt Dievendorf.
As an educator and a mentor, Amy K Bormet amplifies her performance tours with outreach masterclasses and workshops, recently at the Thailand International Jazz Conference (Mahidol University, January 2020) and Los Angeles City College (February 2020). She is a teaching artist, collaborating with the Kennedy Center’s newest programming at the REACH to present and perform with her all-women trio “the future of jazz is female” for middle school students.
She continues to serve as a mentor, teaching at the summer program for the Washington Jazz Arts Institute, where she has participated since she was a high school student at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. She received her Jazz Studies Piano Performance BFA from the University of Michigan, where she serves on the alumni board of the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance. Inspired by her University of Michigan professor Geri Allen, Amy went to Howard University, and graduated with a MFA in Jazz Studies.
As her performance career develops, Amy focuses more on presenting her newest compositions. She began to write orchestral music in 2013 as a part of the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Institute (American Composer’s Orchestra) and premiered several new pieces with her quartet and the Capital City Symphony in February 2017. Her trio and string quartet debuted two sets of new music at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in March 2016. She wrote and performed music for two residencies at the Kennedy Center; Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead for composer/performers and the Mary Lou Williams Emerging Artist Showcase.e a listen to her new self-released album, Striking: It’s an expertly played, handsomely sung record of mostly her own work (and a few standards) that shows not only her technical chops but a remarkable ear for harmony—and, more subtly, a delectable rhythmic sense and precision…”
Having come of age in the cultural melting pot of Wilmington, North Carolina, Keith Butler, Jr. has deep roots in many musical traditions. Due in no small part to his versatility and creativity on the drum set, he has become a mainstay of the Washington D.C. music scene, performing with some of the area’s top bandleaders, including Brian Settles, Saltman/Knowles, Amy K. Bormet, Sarah Hughes, Luke Stewart, Elijah Jamal Balbed, Alex Hamburger, and Stephen Arnold. Butler was also a founding member of adventure music ensemble The New World, and is a member/composer of avant-jazz quartet ¡FIASCO! Butler has composed scores for DC productions of the plays Vietgone, and Venus (a staged reading,) both directed by Natsu Onoda-Power as well as Classic Red, a new play by DC playwright Abigail Chase. Butler released his debut album, Greener Grasses, in April of 2019, and is currently in the finishing stages of his second album. Butler is also a 2022 graduate of the MFA in Music Composition program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
"...seriously one of the most exciting drummers on the planet." -Adam Richards, indieworkshop.com
Chris Corsano (b. 1975, USA) is an upstate NY-based drummer who has been active at the intersections of collective improvisation, free jazz, avant-rock, and noise music since the late 1990's. He began a long-standing, high-energy musical partnership with saxophonist Paul Flaherty in 1998. Their style, which they occasionally refer to with (semi-)tongue-in-cheek humor as "The Hated Music", combines modern free-jazz's ecstatic collectivist spirit and the urgency and intensity of hardcore punk.
A move from western Massachusetts to the UK in 2005 led Corsano to develop his solo music--a dynamic, spontaneously-composed amalgam of extended techniques for drum set and non-percussive instruments of his own making: e.g. bowed violin strings stretched across drum heads, modified reed instruments, and stockpiles of resonant metal. In February 2006, Corsano released his first solo recording, The Young Cricketer, and toured extensively throughout Europe, USA, Australia, and Japan. He spent 2007 and '08 as the drummer on Björk's Volta world tour, all the while weaving in shows and recordings on his days off with the likes of Evan Parker, Virginia Genta, C. Spencer Yeh, and Jandek.
Moving back to the U.S. in 2009, Corsano returned focus to his own projects, including a duo with Michael Flower, Vampire Belt (with Bill Nace), Rangda (with Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny) and his solo work, further expanded in its use of contact microphones and synthesizers. In 2017, he received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artist Award.
Corsano's dedication to collective improvisation has led to collaborations with many kindred spirits and his appearance on over 150 records and 1000 live performances. He's worked with, among others: Paul Dunmall (released by the label: ESP-Disk), Joe McPhee (Roaratorio), Okkyung Lee (Open Mouth), Mette Rasmussen (Hot Cars Warp Records & Clean Feed), John Edwards (OTOroku & Dancing Wayang), Sylvie Courvoisier (Relative Pitch), Nate Wooley (No Business & Astral Spirits), Jim O'Rourke & Akira Sakata (Drag City & Polystar), Merzbow (Family Vineyard), Jessica Rylan (Load Records), Nels Cline (Strange Attractors), Heather Leigh (Volcanic Tongue), Ghédalia Tazartès (Ultra Eczema), Ken Vandermark (Audiographic), and Sunburned Hand Of Man (Manhand).
Sarah Marie Hughes is a performing and visual artist currently living in Washington, DC. She has 26 years of experience playing the alto saxophone and also doubles on the soprano saxophone, flute, and clarinet. She received training in classical saxophone performance from Dale Underwood at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in music education in 2008. In 2015, Hughes earned a master’s degree in jazz saxophone performance from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she studied with Jerry Bergonzi, Ran Blake, Anthony Coleman, and Donny McCaslin.
Hughes’ music is intuitive and genre-liberated while displaying an unquestionable command of her instrument and musical vocabulary. Her improvisations and compositions are infused with knowledge of both traditional and contemporary approaches and combine a love for “The Greats” with a drive to innovate.
Currently, Hughes performs with a variety of musicians in a free jazz context, weaving her own brand of melody and textures into spell-binding sets inspired by the sounds of legendary horn players such as Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane. She also plays jazz standards lovingly with SASH Duo, an ensemble with her partner and collaborator, bassist Steve Arnold.
In her spare time, Hughes creates abstract artwork, which she considers an outgrowth of her compositional and improvisational processes. Her medium is mostly ink and watercolor with some exploration involving acrylics. She is inspired by the works of Kandinsky, Miró, and Dali.
Both musicians, together and separately, have long been an important and active part of Washington D.C.’s new-music scene. Anthony Pirog, an omnivorous, multi-faceted guitarist who studied jazz at Berklee and has performed country, fingerstyle, rock and surf music and Janel Leppin, a conservatory trained cellist steeped in North Indian and Persian classical music, who also plays electric bass in rock bands, have created a lavishly detailed musical journey, by turns ravishing and harrowing. Janel and Anthony alternately charm and challenge, with music that draws from classical, experimental, jazz, rock and electronic traditions but that ultimately is simply theirs.
The result is a marvelous surprise at every turn, as the duo...two absolute virtuosos...create atmospheres that at times evoke the music of Steve Tibbetts, Brian Eno, even soundtrack music" – DownBeat
"Janel & Anthony - guitars and 'cello respectively - play a haunting and humbly virtuosic form of music wherein the elements of electronics, looping, and lo-fi timbres live both in intimacy and in majesty in the same house as acoustic instruments and folk/blues-inspired melodies. As such, it is both timely and timeless, drenched as it is in intoxicating atmosphere; wan, quiet voices submitting to waves of sonic drama. Who could possibly resist it?" – Nels Cline
Self-recording and releasing their 1st album in 2006 and selling thousands of copies at their hundreds of shows, they spent over 3 years conceiving and recording Where Is Home in a professional, analog studio, giving the album a thoughtful, comfortable and lived in feel. Alternating compositions with brief improvisations and soundscapes, Where Is Home captures the dynamic ebb and flow of their live shows where they artfully employ live looping, an array of effects and prepared backing. Simple musical lines grow into complex blocks of echoing sound which eventually are spun and turned into elegiac melodies. The music is both experimental and elegant and smokily psychedelic in a completely modern way.
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. Bonnie was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and is currently a member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, along with Suzanne Thorpe she co-founded TECHNE, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops that center on technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. She has received commissions from the London ICA and Walters Art Museum and has presented her work extensively at institutions in the US, Mexico, Europe and Asia. Bonnie was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Born in South Korea she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland and Providence RI on the lands of the Susquehannock, Piscataway, Algonquian, and Narrangansett.
Drummer, recording artist, educator, Michael Kuhl hails from the musical diverse city of Baltimore MD. Kuhl had studied and performed in numerous genres allowing him to be a first call drummer for any situation.
A graduate from Towson University, Kuhl has performed locally and throughout the globe alongside jazz greats Dave Liebman, Tony Malaby, Michael Formaneck, Dave Ballou, Ellery Eskelin and Claudio Roditi. Outside of jazz, Kuhl has shared the stage with many international acts such as Beach House, Arboretum, Cigarettes After Sex, Tom Tom Club, and The Ravonnettes. As a leader, Kuhl performs with his trio every Tuesday night at Bertha’s in Fells Point, Baltimore.
Alongside of his musical career, Mike is an accomplished martial artist of Bagua Kung Fu, in which he says the two arts go hand in hand.
Josh Modney is a violinist and creative musician working at the nexus of composition, improvisation, and interpretation. A “new-music luminary” (The New York Times) hailed as "one of today's most intrepid experimentalists" (Bandcamp Daily), Modney is a foremost interpreter of adventurous contemporary music, and has cultivated a holistic artistic practice as a composer, solo improviser, bandleader, writer, and collaborator. A highly detailed relationship to sound production on the violin is foundational to Modney’s creative practice, with a particular interest in complex timbres, Just Intonation, and in exploring the perceptual space between improvisation and notation. Modney's recent album debut as a composer, Near To Each (Carrier Records), featuring music for quartet with Ingrid Laubrock (sax), Cory Smythe (piano), Mariel Roberts (cello), and Modney on violin, was lauded by KLANG as "wonderfully composed… remarkably performed… a quartet that is playing individually and collectively at the height of their powers." Modney is the violinist and Executive Director of the composer-performer collective Wet Ink Ensemble, and a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble.
Downbeat Magazine called guitarist/composer/improviser Joe Morris, “the preeminent free music guitarist of his generation.” Will Montgomery, writing in WIRE magazine, called him, “one of the most profound improvisers at work in the U.S.”
He was born in New Haven Connecticut in 1955. He began playing guitar at the age of 14 first playing rock music, progressing to blues, then to jazz, free jazz and free improvisation. He released his first record Wraparound (riti) in 1983. He has composed over 200 original pieces of music.
Morris has performed and/or recorded with many of the most important contemporary artists in improvised music including, Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, John Zorn, Ken Vandermark, Mary Halvorson, Tyshawn Sorey, Tomeka Reid, Fay Victor, Tim Berne, William Parker, Sylvie Courvoisier, Agusti Fernandez, Peter Evans, David S. Ware, Joe Maneri, Dewey Redman, Sunny Murray, Wadada Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris, Marshall Allen, Barre Phillips, Barry Guy, Matthew Shipp, Sunny Murray, and many others.
Morris is featured as leader, co-leader, or sideman on more than 200 commercially released recordings on the labels ECM, ESPdisk, Clean Feed, Hat Hut, Aum Fidelity, Avant, OkkaDisk, Not Two, Soul Note, Leo, No Business, Rogue Art, Relative Pitch, Incus, RareNoise, Fundacja Sluchaj, and his own labels Riti and Glacial Erratic. Morris has toured extensively throughout North America and Europe as well as in Brazil , Korea and Japan.
He has lectured and conducted workshops on his own music and on improvisation in the US, Canada, and Europe including at Princeton University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Bard College, University of Alberta, and University of Guelph. He was the recipient of the 2016 Killam Visiting Scholar Award at University of Calgary. He has been on the faculty at Tufts University, Southern Connecticut State University, Longy School of Music of Bard College, and New School. Since 2000, he has been on the faculty in the Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation Department at New England Conservatory. Morris is the author of the book, Perpetual Frontier: The Properties of Free Music (Riti Publishing 2012).
New York-based saxophonist and composer Sam Newsome often works in the medium of solo saxophone, an approach for which he gained world-wide critical acclaim with his 2009 recording, Blue Soliloquy: Solo Works for Soprano Saxophone. This recording received a five-star review in Downbeat magazine.
Newsome has since released several critically acclaimed solo saxophone CDs: Sonic Journey: Live at the Red Room (2020); Chaos Theory: Song Cycles for Prepared Saxophone (2019); Sopranoville: Works for Prepared and Non-Prepared Saxophone (2017); The Straight Horn of Africa (2014); The Solo Concert: Sam Newsome Plays Monk and Ellington (2013); The Art of the Soprano, Vol. 1 (2012). Ed Enright, from Downbeat magazine, called The Straight Horn of Africa, “a modern masterpiece.”
Many of the notes and sounds used in his compositions and improvisations stem from his sound palette of extended techniques and saxophone preparations. Newsome often attaches tube extensions to the neck of the soprano that significantly changes the timbre of the instrument as well as extends the soprano’s range by an octave or two. Conceptually speaking, Newsome sees himself more along the lines of a visual artist who paints with notes and sounds rather than shapes and colors.
Newsome has also received numerous accolades for his adventurous work, including this year’s 2020 Instant Award in Improvised Music, along with fellow avant-gardists Peter Brotzmann and John Butcher. He was also named a nominee for Soprano Saxophonist of the Year by the 2020 Jazz Journalist Association. Past recognitions include the 2018 New Music USA Grant, the 2018 Alpert/Ragdale Prize in Music Composition and the 2016 NYFA Fellowship for Music Composition
In addition to his solo work, Newsome leads a trio with Hilliard Greene and Reggie Nicholson. He is a frequent collaborator with drummer Andrew Cyrille and vocalist Fay Victor, and he tours regularly with Pepperland, a music and dance work by Mark Morris and Ethan Iverson that pays tribute to The Beatles.
Saxophonist and composer Brian Settles has established himself as a rising force with a long-term artistic vision. Settles blends the outwardly engaging with the deeply personal, reconciling his intimate command of the jazz lineage with a commitment to his own experimental voice. He performs regularly with some of modern jazz's leading groups, including Tomas Fujiwara and The Hook Up, Michael Formanek's Cheating Heart and Big Band Kolossus, and bands led by Jonathan Finlayson. Settles has also accompanied the likes of Gil Scott-Heron, Jason Moran and Marc Cary.
Settles’ two albums as a leader feature entirely original music, highlighting his buoyant, pithy compositions: Secret Handshake (Engine, 2011) featured the five-piece Central Union, and was named the best jazz record of the year by both the Washington City Paper and CapitalBop.com. Settles followed up with Folk (Engine, 2013), a trio album acclaimed by Something Else Reviews and the NYC Jazz Record.
Born and raised in Washington, DC, Settles picked up the saxophone in the eighth grade and was immediately enamored. The next year he enrolled in the prestigious Duke Ellington School of the Arts, where he spent the next four years studying with renowned saxophonist and educator Davey Yarborough. During his time at Ellington, Settles began a ten-year mentorship with tenor saxophone legend Stanley Turrentine. This exposure to the life of a veteran performer and recording artist solidified his plans of becoming a jazz musician.
Settles went on to attend the New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music, where he was mentored by bass legend Reggie Workman and saxophonist Arnie Lawrence, the school’s founder. After graduating from the New School, Settles joined forces with bassist, Tom Abbs and drummer, Chad Taylor. Under Abbs’ leadership, the trio (Frequency Response) performed throughout New York City and in 2003 (with the addition of cellist, Okkyung Lee) recorded the album Conscription (CIMP - 288).
In 2008 Settles earned a master’s degree in music from Howard University, where he studied with the great saxophonist Charlie Young. While at Howard, Settles joined drummer Tomas Fujiwara in The Hook Up. The quintet has since released three well-received albums, and has been celebrated by the New York Times as “a gathering of sharp young improvisers … insightful [and] invigorating.” And Settles has earned a growing chorus of acclaim on his own: In 2015 he was listed as a rising star on tenor saxophone, in Downbeat magazine’s critics poll, and he earned an artist fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. All the while he’s worked with young musicians as a teacher and mentor at the Washington Jazz Arts Institute, where he has served since 2002.
To anyone who’s heard it, Settles’ warbling, viscous tone is immediately recognizable, and his solos are never too quick with their emotional payoff. Inky and warm, his playing can seem to hover weightlessly while simultaneously boring down. Critic Michael J. West calls Settles “absolutely heart-stopping on the bandstand … known for his versatility, expressiveness, and dizzying imagination” (Washington City Paper).
Lester St. Louis is a New York City-born and based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and curator. Lester has worked in, performed and created in artistic environments in The United States, Canada, South America, Europe and China with groups and artists such as Dré Hočevar Trio, Jaimie Branch Fly or Die, Ensemble Adapter, TAK Ensemble and many more. As a composer, Lester has been commissioned by artists such as the JACK Quartet, Mahan Esfahani and Stefan Jackiw, RAGE THORMBONES, Lauren Cauley and others. In the near future Lester will be continuing to develop groups such as MADD (with Dré Hočevar and Leafar) as well as TRANSFER (with Jordan Balaber, Daniel Brew and Rocío Bolaños) along with many new ventures.
Luke Stewart is a DC/NYC-based musician and organizer of important musical presentations, and has a strong presence in the national and international Improvised Music community. He is noted in Downbeat Magazine in 2020 as one of “25 most influential jazz artists” of his generation. He was profiled in the Washington Post in early 2017 as “holding down the jazz scene,” selected as “Best Musical Omnivore” in the Washington City Paper’s 2017 “Best of DC,” chosen as “Jazz Artist of the Year” for 2017 in the District Now, and in the 2014 People Issue of the Washington City Paper as a “Jazz Revolutionary,” citing his multi-faceted cultural activities throughout DC.
In New York City, Luke collaborated with Arts for Art in hosting the first ever “Free Jazz Convention” to share resources and strategies among the community. He has also performed in a myriad of collaborations and performances in venues such as the Kitchen, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pioneer Works, Roulette, and Issue Project Room.
Luke is also a presence in the greater community of Creative Musicians, with regular multi-city ensembles including 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 been compiling 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.
He has performed at many important venues in DC, NYC, and around the world.
As a scholar/performer, he has performed and lectured at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Medgar Evers College, George Mason University, Wayne State University, University of Montana, New Mexico State University, and the University of South Carolina.
He holds a BA in International Studies and a BA in Audio Production from American University, and an MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship from the New School.
In 2019, Luke was also a finalist for the Johnson Fellowship, citing his work in changing the musical fabric of Washington, DC.
Nate Wooley (b.1974) was born in Clatskanie, Oregon. He is known for his idiosyncratic trumpet language and mastery of extended techniques. Wooley made his debut as soloist with the New York Philharmonic at the opening series of their 2019 season. He is the editor of Sound American Publications, a journal dedicated to featuring the ideas and work of musicians in their own words. The journal has released 28 issues to date. He is the recipient of the FCA Grants to Artists Award and the Spencer Glendon Award for Ethics in the Arts. Wooley currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Mutual Aid Music is the ongoing project from Nate Wooley that features almost 100 separate compositional elements—graphic scores, text, traditional notation, chord changes, etc.—that are utilized by the pool of composers, improvisors, and instrumentalists that make up the large ensemble. For this special show at Rhizome, Wooley has chosen one member from each of MAM’s incarnations: Ingrid Laubrock from the proto-MAM group, Battle Pieces; Joshua Modney from Mutual Aid Music’s first recording; and Lester St. Louis, who just recorded Wooley’s new set of pieces, Experiments. The music works on the theory that, with a small amount of guidance, human beings can create a natural complexity far more interesting than a compositional one.