Today we focus on the Grasshoppers program with Douglas Detrick and Nate Francis. Douglas is the Director of Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, a working musician, and a really nice guy. Nate is a student musician, but also a working sideman himself, and has not yet graduated High School. The concert that this program culminates with …
Category Archives: Music
THE PRIME SOUND OF LEE/HANNAFIN DUO
Portland improvisers Dr. Catherine Lee and Matt Hannafin’s self-released LP Five Shapes Five Shapes lulls the mind with its gentle spaciousness into a personal creative space. It is five improvisations of nameless shapes, making one whole prime number. In case you forgot, five cannot be divided by any other whole number (hence prime). Recorded live in …
LOTA’S ELECTRIC LANDSCAPE
Spooky electro artist Lota released the Amarantia EP last month on Pakapi Records The haunting introduction may lead you to believe that a droning synth-noise album is in store. As soon as you settle into that, the feeling changes. A beat drops and rhythms push out of that darkness. Psychoactive rain showers from sideways planes, …
What Sahrawi Sounds and Looks Like
The first of two documentaries presented by Sublime Frequencies on Sunday night at the Hollywood Theatre was Palace of the Winds, Hisham Mayet’s field recordings of the people, landscapes and music of the Western Sahara and Mauritania shot between 2006 and 2008. Mayet is a co-founder of Sublime Frequencies, a record label and media collective …
Sixth Annual Quiet Music Festival, A Photo Journal
Only one music festival turns off the loudness button for a weekend. Stephanie Leet and I split coverage of the QMF, she attended on Friday and I went on Saturday. It was Steph’s first time and reading through her notes on the evening, it was an imaginative experience for me — she was in The Jungle Book …
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Stressing Strings Out
Stressings by Jordan Dykstra: How to make the viola cry. Sometimes we need to question the difference between beautiful and pretty. I’m not about to tackle such a lofty rhetorical exercise, but it should be safe to say that your concept of pretty, beautiful, is not mine, and not least Jordan Dykstra’s. He is a …
Improvisation Summit of Portland Photo Journal
New worlds of improvised form were showcased at Creative Music Guild’s fifth annual ISP. In the spirit of this festival, the following was developed in an improvisational manner. As the event progressed, I posted photos and thoughts that were gradually edited, revised, and distilled — when I was able to rouse myself back up. Two nights and one full …
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The Staying Power of Peter Brötzmann
One of Europe’s best known free jazz players mesmerizes old fans in Portland. Peter Brötzmann’s Quartet took the stage at Mississippi Studios last Thursday night in silence, setting a powerful tone of what was to come, which I will say now, was something musically fierce. With no commentary or following encore, the band set off, led …
From Island to Ocean to Ocean
Japan Noise Tour Kicks Off in North Portland The term “noise” might be derogatory in some cases, implying uninvited sound. But there is another view which contends that all sound, invited or not, is music, so it just depends on how seriously the musician takes their noise. One might suggest that the latter would be …