Concert: Alternating Currents Live presents Trio Blonk, Smith, & Zerang *HY

Alternating Currents Live presents Trio Blonk, Smith, & Zerang.

Jaap Blonk—voice, electronics

Damon Smith—double bass

Michael Zerang—percussion

From Jaap Blonk, February 2025:

This trio has been a long-standing wish of both Damon and me. Michael Zerang and I go back to the mid-1990’s, when we started playing together in the U.S. and the Netherlands, and recorded trio CDs with Mats Gustafsson and Fred Lonberg-Holm. With Damon, I first played in 1998 at a festival in Sicily. Then, from 2012 on, we performed together regularly and released 6 CDs and a couple of cassettes together. We’re all seasoned and full-blown improvisers. So I am hugely looking forward to finally performing as a trio.

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. At present, he has developed into a specialist in the creation and performance of sound poetry and a unique vocal improviser, supported by a powerful and uninhibited stage presence. He performs and gives workshops worldwide on a regular basis. 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.

Damon Smith studied double bass with Lisle Ellis and has 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 in the 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 Man and 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), Henry Kaiser, 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, and Chris Cogburn. Damon moved to the Boston area in the fall of 2016 and began working with Jeb Bishop, Joe McPhee, Ra-Kalam Bob Moses, and many others. Damon has run Balance Point Acoustics record label since 2001, releasing music focusing on transatlantic collaborations between U.S. and European musicians.

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 Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, Friction Brothers, Brötzmann/McPhee/Kessler/Zerang Quartet, KARKHANA, and Survival Unit III with Joe McPhee and Fred Lonberg-Holm. He has collaborated extensively with contemporary theater, dance, and other multidisciplinary forms and has received three Joseph Jefferson Awards for Original Music Composition in Theater, in 1996, 1998, and 2000. He has over one-hundred-and-twenty titles in his discography and has toured nationally and internationally to 40 countries since 1981 with an ever-widening pool of collaborators. He was the artistic director of the Link’s Hall Performance Series from 1985–1989 where he produced over 300 concerts of jazz, traditional ethnic 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 his own space, The Candlestick Maker in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood, from 2001–2005.

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