ivy room presentsWEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 20TH—HELEN GILLET w/ SCOTT AMENDOLA—Doors 7:00pm / Show 8:00pm$20 Admission—IVY ROOM860 San Pablo Ave, Albany • 21+(rsvp on facebook)HELEN GILLET—Helen Gillet is a musician, composer, cellist, singer (Belgian French & English), improviser and looping artist. Her prolific career has won her awards of Offbeat Best of the Beat, Gambit Big Easy Awards, featured artist at the New Orleans Jazz Museum and has been nominated three times, most recently in 2023, as a rising star in Downbeat Magazine's Critics Poll. She has played, recorded with many musicians over the past 20 years, including members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, AACM (Chicago), ICP (Holland), Members of Morphine, Kidd Jordan, Marianne Faithful, Cassandra Wilson, Delfeayo and Jason Marsalis, Steve Earle, Iron & Wine (North America Tour 2018), Zachary Richard, opened up as a solo artist for Les Claypool at the Orpheum Theatre in New Orleans in 2003 and Jeff Tweedy at Lincoln Center in 2019...
read more
ivy room presentsWEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 20TH—HELEN GILLET w/ SCOTT AMENDOLA—Doors 7:00pm / Show 8:00pm$20 Admission—IVY ROOM860 San Pablo Ave, Albany • 21+(rsvp on facebook)HELEN GILLET—Helen Gillet is a musician, composer, cellist, singer (Belgian French & English), improviser and looping artist. Her prolific career has won her awards of Offbeat Best of the Beat, Gambit Big Easy Awards, featured artist at the New Orleans Jazz Museum and has been nominated three times, most recently in 2023, as a rising star in Downbeat Magazine's Critics Poll. She has played, recorded with many musicians over the past 20 years, including members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, AACM (Chicago), ICP (Holland), Members of Morphine, Kidd Jordan, Marianne Faithful, Cassandra Wilson, Delfeayo and Jason Marsalis, Steve Earle, Iron & Wine (North America Tour 2018), Zachary Richard, opened up as a solo artist for Les Claypool at the Orpheum Theatre in New Orleans in 2003 and Jeff Tweedy at Lincoln Center in 2019. She has performed at a variety of festivals and venues worldwide including the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, Dark MOFO Festival in Tasmania, Darwin World Music Festival, New Orleans Jazz Festival, New Direction Cello Society Festival at Berkeley College of Music, Kennedy Center and at The Big Ears Music Festival in 2024 and many more.Helen Gillet is a singer-songwriter and surrealist-archeologist exploring synthesized sounds, texture, and rhythm using an acoustic cello. For someone with her varied background, New Orleans, with its mix of cultures and musics, seemed like a natural place to call home.Born in Belgium, and raised in Singapore from the ages of 2 to 11, Helen Gillet was routinely shuttled between the homelands of her Belgian father and American mother planting the notion that a healthy ecosystem in life and art is one of immense variety. Over the years, working in New Orleans with musicians of all stripes, from avant-garde jazz and classical to pop and funk, Gillet has developed a singular polyglot style. The core of her work is solo performance with live looping, layering cello parts and vocal lines. Rhythmic figures emerge with bowed or plucked ostinatos or a variety of rubbing and slapping on the body of the cello, then enhanced with melodies played or sung in her haunting alto. Her mixed musical vocabulary is commensurate with her disparate travels — French chanson of the 1940s, Belgian folk tunes sung in Walloon, a mix of rock and punk from the likes of PJ Harvey and X-Ray Spex, and her own affecting originals, like audience favorite “Julien,” sung in a mix of French and English.Gillet’s solo performance is known for its enigmatic quality as she fabricates each song with innovative use of the cello and true mastery of live looping technology.SCOTT AMENDOLA—For Scott Amendola, the drum kit isn’t so much an instrument as a musical portal. As an ambitious composer, savvy bandleader, electronics explorer, first-call accompanist and capaciously creative foil for some of the world’s most inventive musicians, Amendola applies his wide-ranging rhythmic virtuosity to a vast array of settings. His closest musical associates include guitarists Charlie Hunter, Nels Cline, and Jeff Parker, Hammond B-3 organist Wil Blades, violinist Jenny Scheinman, saxophonist Phillip Greenlief, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, bassists Trevor Dunn, and Todd Sickafoose, players who have each forged a singular path within and beyond the realm of jazz.While rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area scene, Amendola has woven a dense and far-reaching web of bandstand relationships that tie him to influential artists in jazz, blues, rock and new music. A potent creative catalyst, the Berkeley-based drummer is the nexus for a disparate community of musicians stretching from Los Angeles and Seattle to Chicago and New York. Whatever the context, Amendola possesses a gift for twisting musical genres in unexpected directions.Over a career spanning more than three decades, Amendola has forged deep ties across the country, and throughout the world. As an ambitious composer, savvy bandleader, electronics explorer, first-call accompanist, and capaciously creative foil for some of the world’s most inventive musicians, Amendola applies his wide-ranging rhythmic virtuosity to a vast array of settings.“Nobody fuses like Scott Amendola – he’s not pandering, he just loves to rock, and freak out, and write actual tunes, and improvise, and devise a space where great musicians can explode.” Greg Burk, metaljazz.comScott’s involved in various working bands including: The Scott Amendola Trio, Scott Amendola Band, Charlie Hunter/Scott Amendola Duo, The Nels Cline Singers, Nels Cline and Scott Amendola are Stretch Woven, Amendola vs. Blades, Invisible Bird, and Mike Patton’s Mondo Cane.
show less
