Oakland Freedom Jazz Society Presents:
Elder Ones with Dunkelman/Fluke-Mogul/Nishi-Smith Trio
Elder Ones is a quartet led by vocalist, harmonium player and composer Amirtha Kidambi. Kidambi fuses the ecstatic and revolutionary free jazz spirituality of John and Alice Coltrane’s later work with her own background in Carnatic and Western classical vocal techniques. Her quartet includes Max Jaffe on drums and his custom Sensory Percussion electronics, Matt Nelson on soprano sax and synthesizer, and Nick Dunston on bass. On their new album From Untruth, Elder Ones anchor their music in the tradition of free jazz while pushing into new futurist realms, reeling seamlessly from modal meditation, atonal expressionism, free improvisation and melodic invention, to unabashed bursts of punk rock energy infused with an explosive charge of protest. ...
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Oakland Freedom Jazz Society Presents:
Elder Ones with Dunkelman/Fluke-Mogul/Nishi-Smith Trio
Elder Ones is a quartet led by vocalist, harmonium player and composer Amirtha Kidambi. Kidambi fuses the ecstatic and revolutionary free jazz spirituality of John and Alice Coltrane’s later work with her own background in Carnatic and Western classical vocal techniques. Her quartet includes Max Jaffe on drums and his custom Sensory Percussion electronics, Matt Nelson on soprano sax and synthesizer, and Nick Dunston on bass. On their new album From Untruth, Elder Ones anchor their music in the tradition of free jazz while pushing into new futurist realms, reeling seamlessly from modal meditation, atonal expressionism, free improvisation and melodic invention, to unabashed bursts of punk rock energy infused with an explosive charge of protest.
"Vicious music for tense times." — JazzTimes, Mike Shanley
Sometimes the eye of a storm can draw upon the chaos around it, taking on its energy and consolidating it for use. Something like that is going on in Elder Ones, the quartet led by the vocalist and harmonium player Amirtha Kidambi. She creates drones on the harmonium — an old, air-powered keyboard — and coaxes her bandmates into ripping them apart. Then her voice funnels that energy out in a scorching beam. In its best moments, it’s like a mix of a Cuban soñero’s citrusy cry and a riot grrrl yowl. — New York Times, Giovanni Russonello
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Nava Dunkelman is a Bay Area based percussionist and improviser. Born in Tokyo, Japan and raised in a multi-cultural environment by an American father and Indonesian mother. Her musical interests span the globe from Japanese taiko to Indonesian gamelan to American marching band, and from classical to contemporary to the avant-garde. She has performed and collaborated with William Winant, Fred Frith, John Zorn, Ikue Mori, George Lewis, Matmos and many others. She has performed classical and contemporary pieces with the William Winant Percussion Group, Joan Jeanrenaud, San Francisco Girls Chorus, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and others. She also formed electro-percussion experimental noise duo IMA, and improvisational duo DunkelpeK.
gabby fluke-mogul is an improvising violinist, composer, & educator living in Oakland, CA. they speak through languages of the jazz continuum, avant-garde, & folk traditions, deeply embodying the violin in their solo & ensemble playing. Through composing/performing, gfm hopes to create space for individual & collective intersectional process, intimacy, & vulnerability. they are interested in the sensual nature of sound—how queer desire & eroticism are embodied & translated within the political & poetic contexts of improvisation.
Kanoko Nishi-Smith is an artist currently based in SF/Bay Area. Despite her early training in classical piano performance and past involvement in Contemporary/New music performances, her most recent interest has primarily been in improvisational music making, both in a solo context and in collaborations with other artists. She has been exploring both on the piano, as well as on her second instrument, koto (13, or 17-string Japanese zither), various extended techniques, widening the range of vocabularies on each instrument and enabling them to adapt to different situations, both musical, and interdisciplinary.
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