Fay Victor's SoundNoiseFUNK & Dan Blacksberg's Snake Lines

PROOF OF VACCINATION & MASKS REQUIRED. SEATING IS LIMITED FOR PURPOSES OF DISTANCING, ADVANCED RESERVATIONS ARE STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.

Fay Victor‘s SoundNoiseFUNK:

Fay Victor – voice, compositions, Sam Newsome – soprano saxophone + toys, Joe Morris –electric guitar & Reggie Nicholson – drums

The idea of developing an avant-garde ‘dance’ group has been a vision for sound artist Fay Victor’s for some time. Victor started SoundNoise with drummer/percussionist Reggie Nicholson and soprano saxophonist Sam Newsome in 2015 as an open exploration that hit hard their first time out. As SoundNoise developed, Victor thought about how best to pursue improvisation at the core while keeping a pulse in the music that was organic and alive. With the addition of guitarist Joe Morris, what you have is SoundNoiseFUNK, a free improvisational unit of master musicians with a penchant for exploring sonic terrain while keeping the groove going.

SoundNoiseFUNK released Wet Robots to great critical acclaim in 2018, with 4.5 stars in DownBeat Magazine, reviews in PopMatters, JazzTimes and taking 4th place for Best Vocal Album of 2018 in the NPR Jazz Critics Poll. SoundNoise & SoundNoiseFUNK has performed at Roulette, the Vision Festival, The Earshot Jazz Festival, Capital Bop (Wash. DC), New Revolution Arts, The Harlem Jazz Series, the InGarden Series and the WinterJazzFest in 2018. In October 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, SoundNoiseFUNK released their sophomore release We’ve Had Enough! (ESP-Disk), a live date from late 2019, adding composed pieces to the SoundNoiseFUNK mix. Nate Chinen has this to say about What’s Gone Wrong, one of the new compositions on We’ve Had Enough! that was part of Chinen’s Take Five blog for WBGO Jazz:

“In her working ensemble SoundNoiseFUNK, she engages fully with an outright all-star team: soprano saxophonist Sam Newsome, guitarist Joe Morris and drummer Reggie Nicholson. Their second album, just out on ESP-Disk is plainly titled We’ve Had Enough. “What’s Gone Wrong” is an impassioned lament that finds Victor repeating its title phrase, along with a secondary clause (“…with the world?”). There is despair in her rhetorical question, which doesn’t seem to expect an answer — but there’s also clear determination in the way Victor and her improvising partners work through their development. Without putting words in their mouth, I’d suggest that their cohesive oneness is one answer to another open question: what’s going right?”

Dan Blacksberg‘s Snake Lines:

Dan Blacksberg‘s newest group, Snake Lines are a quartet of cutting-edge jazz musicians. Joining Blacksberg on trombone are Philly stalwart Matt Engle on bass, and rising stars Maya Keren on keyboard and Nazir Ebo on drums. They’ll perform Blacksberg’s original music, full of evocative melodies, unlikely sonorities, and surprising interactions drawn from the sonic history of the avant-garde and Philadelphia jazz.

Philadelphia-native Dan Blacksberg has created a singular musical voice as a trombonist, composer, and educator. One of the foremost practitioners of klezmer trombone and a respected voice in jazz & experimental music, Dan is known for a formidable virtuosity and versatility. This has led to performances with artists such klezmer masters as Elaine Hoffman Watts, Frank London, and Adrienne Cooper, experimentalists like Anthony Braxton, Susan Alcorn, and George Lewis, and extreme doom metal band The Body.

Dan composes music from danceable klezmer melodies on Radiant Others, to genre-busting projects like his Hasidic doom metal band Deveykus and Name Of the Sea, Dan forges music that “aims to infuse the fearless avant-garde with timeless sounds and techniques, and vice versa.” (WXPN’s The Key)

Dan currently teaches jazz and klezmer at Temple University, coordinates the Instrumental and Dance programs at Yiddish New York with Deb Strauss, and is the musician-in-residence at Kol Tzedek Synagogue. He also makes the Radiant Others Klezmer Podcast.

This performance is made possible with the support of Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Penn Treaty Special Services District.

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