BlueStem Jazz featuring Tropos

BlueStem Jazz presents Tropos

Tropos is a collective ensemble of improviser-composers featuring four distinctive voices in Brooklyn’s creative music scene: Phillip Golub (piano), Ledah Finck (violin), Yuma Uesaka (clarinets), and Aaron Edgcomb (drums/percussion). Their peculiar instrumentation and collaborative approach are defining characteristics of their work as an ensemble. As recipients of Chamber Music America’s 2023 Ensemble Forward grant, Tropos spent a year developing their forthcoming album Switches (Endectomorph Music) under the mentorship of acclaimed saxophonist and composer Darius Jones. Tropos’ members call their aesthetic “outer-space chamber music” for the way their compositions push the boundaries between new music, jazz, noise, and beyond.

Tropos’ debut album, Axioms // 75ab, was released in May 2020 on Biophilia Records. Featuring an earlier iteration of the ensemble — Phillip Golub (piano), Mario Fabrizio (drums/percussion), Raef Sengupta (alto saxophone), Zach Lavine (bass), and Laila Smith (voice) — Axioms // 75ab paired compositions by Golub, Fabrizio, and Sengupta alongside those of Anthony Braxton. Thom Jurek of AllMusic called Axioms // 75ab “an auspicious debut, filled with exhilarating energy, charisma, and a canny ability to transform the complex and even inscrutable into sophisticated yet joyful noise.” Steve Smith selected Axioms as his album of the week in his Night after Night blog and said that “Tropos plays with assurance, charisma, and infectious enthusiasm,” while Phil Freeman wrote “This is their debut, and they’re making a powerful statement” in StereoGum.

Phillip Golub (b. 1993), “a musician in fast ascent” (Wall Street Journal) with “seemingly boundless creativity” (Downbeat), is a pianist, improviser, and composer based in Brooklyn, NY. Originally from Los Angeles, he creates highly original and expressive music, grounded in but not constrained by his engaged practice in jazz, creative music, and new music. Technically audacious, Phillip sublates sound worlds as distant as Thelonious Monk and Alexander Scriabin, the ars subtilior and Cecil Taylor, negating conventions, yet building on traditions. ​He has been described as “a polymath who elides any divide between ​improvised and composed music, or jazz and contemporary approaches […] whose practice can’t be contained by genre or discipline” (The Wire Magazine).

Phillip’s recordings have been praised as “cutting edge” (Sequence 21) and containing “a profound concept […] triumphant […] fascinating” (Pop Matters). As a player, he has been described as bringing “assurance, charisma, and infectious enthusiasm” (Steve Smith) to his performances and manifesting “exhilarating energy, charisma, and a canny ability to transform the complex and even inscrutable into sophisticated yet joyful noise” (Allmusic.com).

Phillip is in demand as a pianist on New York’s jazz, creative music, and world music stages, performing and recording regularly across numerous sub-genres and scenes, such as Layale Chaker, DoYeon Kim, Lesley Mok, Anna Webber, Jacob Shulman, and Seajun Kwon, at venues such as Roulette, National Sawdust, and many other Brooklyn mainstays.

Phillip has an unwavering commitment to honoring the genealogy of jazz. He has played numerous times with Cecil McBee and worked extensively with Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding on their opera … (Iphigenia). He continues to play a crucial role in the Shorter estate, digitizing and preparing manuscripts for publication.

phillipgolubmusic.com

Ledah Finck is a violinist, violist, improviser, and composer based in NYC. A passionate performer, creator, and curator of contemporary classical and experimental music, she is a co-founder of the Bergamot Quartet, as well as Tropos (collective of composers and improvisers) and earspace ensemble (contemporary music ensemble based in Raleigh, NC). As a composer, she has been commissioned by Imani Winds, Alarm Will Sound/Now Hear This, Ayane and Paul, the Bridge Ensemble, and The Peabody Community Chorus among others. Her music embodies a desire to create and share a sound-world in which the classical tradition, the folk music with which she grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and an extensive improvisatory sensibility can be in productive dialogue.

In 2019 she was invited to perform as part of the Sitka Summer Music Festival and the Lucerne Festival Alumni tour. With the Bergamot Quartet, she participated in the Ensemble Modern Chamber Music Academy in Innsbruck, the Quatuor Diotima Academy in France, the Next Festival of Emerging Artists, the Banff Centre Evolution of the String Quartet program, and the Young Artist Development Series in El Paso, TX. Ledah has also participated in Ensemble Modern’s Klangspuren Academy, the Bang on a Can summer institute at MASS MoCA, Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival and School, and the Yellow Barn Young Artists Program. She holds undergraduate and master’s degrees in violin performance and composition from the Peabody Conservatory, where she studied with Herbert Greenberg, Oscar Bettison, and Judah Adashi, and studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Kenan Scholarship, a full fellowship for musical and academic merit. She plays a 2012 violin by her father, David Finck.

ledahfinck.com

Yuma Uesaka (b. 1991) is a Japanese-American saxophonist, clarinetist, improviser, performer, and composer based in New York City since 2014. Over the last decade, Yuma has contributed to scenes that embrace various experimental and historic practices primarily rooted in jazz, creative improvised music, and new music. His music often explores the fringes of instrumental and compositional techniques to question traditional musical roles and deconstruct assumed binaries of improvised/composed, acoustic/electronic, and music/noise.

Collaboration is central to Yuma’s musical practice. Described as “packed with unexpected details and aglow with shared intuition” by WBGO, Streams documents an intimate duo with pianist Marilyn Crispell. He is also a member of Ocelot, a co-led trio with Cat Toren and Colin Hinton whose eponymous album was listed as Best Jazz March 2021 on Bandcamp. In 2022, he joined Tropos, a collaborative quartet featuring Ledah Finck, Aaron Edgcomb, and Phillip Golub. Both Ocelot and Tropos received Chamber Music America’s Ensemble Forward Grant to produce forthcoming albums under the guidance of Wadada Leo Smith and Darius Jones, respectively.

More recently, Yuma has been developing works for solo woodwinds. These works emphasize the physicality of acoustic instrumental performance, pushing its sonic capabilities to the limit by engaging with circular breathing, vocalizing, and extreme articulations. He also incorporates and amplifies typically suppressed sounds such as saliva and air noise to emulate timbres often found in electronic music.

An active sideperson, Yuma has performed in groups led by Anna Webber, Lesley Mok, and DoYeon Kim, at venues such as Roulette, National Sawdust, and The Jazz Gallery. He can be heard on Pi, American Dreams, and NotTwo Records. As a composer, he has received recognition from the ASCAP Foundation, Metropolis, and Either/Or Ensemble.

yumasax.com

Aaron Edgcomb (he/they) is a composer, drummer, and percussionist from Reno, NV, currently living in Brooklyn, NY whose work appears in such contexts as improvisational music, jazz, “new music”, noise, and song. At the forefront of Aaron’s artistic practice is considering how music creates and changes ideology.

Aaron has performed in and composed for many ensembles including: the avant-rock band Clak; the solo percussion and electronics project REA; The Gown of Entry an improvisational trio that incorporates poetry; and the improvising hardcore trio Trigger. They have collaborated with such artists as John Zorn, Ted Reichman, Chris Williams, Lisa Hoppe, Adam Dunson, The Ladles, and Anthony Coleman.

Aaron has performed extensively around the world at such venues as the MoMA PS1, National Sawdust, Roulette, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the North Sea Jazz Festival, the Sarajevo Jazz Festival, and the Jazz Em Agosto Festival in Lisbon; not to mention the uncountable and invaluable living rooms, garages, basements, and DIY venues that work so hard to keep creative music alive.

Aaron holds a B.M. in Jazz and Percussion from the University of Nevada, Reno, where his studies ranged from music to gender and identity, as well as a M.M. in Contemporary Improvisation from the New England Conservatory. Currently, Aaron is composing new works for solo and ensemble performance (and occasionally poetry and prose) and teaching percussion/composition/improvisation.

aaronedgcomb.com

Photo by Tarishi Gupta

This event is BYOB.

Presented by BlueStem Jazz:

https://bluestemjazz.org/

and Audio for the Arts:

https://audioforthearts.com/

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