BlueStem Jazz featuring Jaap Blonk Trio

Damon Smith studied double bass with Lisle Ellis andhas had lessons with Bertram Turetzky, Joëlle Léandr, John Lindberg, Mark Dresser and others. Damon’s explorations into the sonic palette of the double bass have resulted in a personal, flexible improvisational language based inthe American jazz avant-garde movement and European non-idiomatic free improvisation. Visual art, film and dance heavily influence his music, as evidenced by his CAMH performance of Ben Patterson’s Variations for Double Bass, collaborations with director Werner Herzog on soundtracks for Grizzly Manand Encounters at the End of the World, and an early performance with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Damon has collaborated with a wide range of musicians,including: Cecil Taylor, Marshall Allen (of Sun Ra’s Arkestra), HenryKaiser, Roscoe Mitchell, Michael Pisaro, Wadada Leo Smith,Marco Eneidi, Wolfgang Fuchs, Peter Brötzmann and Peter Kowald. After many years in the San Francisco Bay Area, and six great years in Houston, Texas working regularly with Alvin Fielder, Sandy Ewen, David Dove & Chris Cogburn.

Michael Zerang was born in Chicago, Illinois and is a first generation American of Assyrian decent. He has been an active musician, composer, and producer since 1976, focusing extensively on improvised music, free jazz, contemporary composition, puppet theater, experimental theater, and international musical forms. He has been a long-standing member of The Peter BrötzmannChicago Tentet, Friction Brothers, Brötzmann/McPhee/Kessler/Zerang Quartet, KARKHANA and Survival Unit III with Joe McPhee and Fred Lonberg-Holm.

He was the artistic director of the Link's Hall PerformanceSeries from 1985-1989 where he produced over 300 concerts of jazz, traditionalethnic folk music, electronic music, and other forms of forward thinking music.He continued to produce concerts at Cafe Urbus Orbis from 1994-1996, and at hisown space, The Candlestick Maker in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood, from2001 - 2005.

Jaap Blonk (born 1953 in Woerden, Netherlands) is a self-taught composer, vocalist, poet and visual artist. His unfinished studies in mathematics and musicology mainly created a penchant for activities in a Dada vein, as did several unsuccessful jobs in offices and other well organized systems.

In the early 1980s he discovered the power and flexibility of his voice, and set out on a long term research of phonetics and the possibilities of the human voice. Over the years, with live electronics he developed a similar agility as with his voice. To this date Blonk’s music has appeared on 30 CDs with his own Kontrans label; many other recordings as well as about a dozen books with his visual work have been published in several countries.

We’re all seasoned and full-blown improvisers. So I am hugely looking forward to finally performing as a trio.

- JaapBlonk, February 2025

Presented by BlueStem Jazz:

https://bluestemjazz.org/

and Audio for the Arts:

https://audioforthearts.com/

This event is BYOB

Host or Publisher Audio for the Arts