An Ill​-​Fitting Garment — Album Release

Improv Spaces presents the first stop of the album release tour of An Ill​-​Fitting Garment featuring Brooklyn and Chicago-based musicians Eli Wallace, piano; Bill Harris, drums; Josh Berman, trumpet; and Ishmael Ali, cello. The evening at Mt Ida Preservation Hall in Troy, NY will open with a special performance by Albany-based percussionist Matt Weston.

The music of Wallace, Harris, Berman and Ali underline improvisational collaboration, what might seem foreign and familiar, and how parts make a whole. 

After convening for a recording session at Marmalade Studios in Chicago, IL, in 2021, the improvising quartet continued to hone their collective sonic identity through regular live concerts in Chicago. As documented on their first cassette release, An Ill-Fitting Garment, the group focuses on acoustic interplay, resulting in music featuring acousmatic moments that obfuscate who makes which sound, blurring and bending rhythms and pitches into a syncretic whole. Wallace’s ability to cull variegated sounds from the prepared piano matches Harris’s percussive textures and unique rhythmic sensibility. Berman and Ali find common ground in pitched and harmonic material that can sometimes disperse into territories resembling synth and electronic sounds. All four musicians trade roles during their musical interactions, sometimes falling into the background while interjecting with aberrant melodic statements at other times. The group strives to create a unified heuristic sound that simultaneously features each individual while constantly generating a sense of rhythmic propulsion, at times subtle, at times bombastic. 

 Albany-based percussionist Matt Weston will open the evening with a special solo performance.  Weston plays percussion and electronics, and has performed throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. A student of Arthur Brooks, Bill Dixon, and Milford Graves, Weston has also collaborated with Ilyas Ahmed, Bill Callahan/Smog, Kevin Drumm, Mary Halvorson, Jeff Parker, and many others. His recordings have been hailed by Vital Weekly as “some of the best modern music,” and his 2023 double LP Embrace This Twilight was chosen for Bandcamp’s year-end Best Experimental Music list.

Bandcamp Links:

https://bermanwallacealiharris.bandcamp.com/album/an-ill-fitting-garment

http://mattweston.bandcamp.com

Special thanks to Artist Pianos

Host or Publisher Improv Spaces