Billy Bang

Violinist, composer and improviser Billy Bang is one of the most prolific and original members of the progressive scene. He is known for his work with The Survival Ensemble, which he founded in the 1970s. He later co-founded The String Trio Of New York and is an original member of Kahil El'Zabar's Ritual Trio. In addition, Bang has performed and collaborated with Sam Rivers, Frank Lowe, Don Cherry, Marilyn Crispell, James Blood Ulmer, Roy Campbell, William Parker, Andrew Cyrille and Sun Ra, among many, many others.

His Roulette performance will showcase the unique improvisational style and unmistakable trademark sound for which he is known.

Marko Ciciliani and Anne La Berge

Anne La Berge (flute and electronics) and Marko Ciciliani (no-input mixer) like to get the room rumbling and then go from there. Serving up a wall-to-wall mosiac of hum and buzz, patterned noise, warm distortion and dancing feedback, this duo always finds a way extract demonically clever melodies and glistening harmonies out of the fray. La Berge's virtuosic microtones splice and dice melodic lines until they dissolve back into the fold or mesh into one of Ciciliani's broad strokes of colored noise. While La Berge is known for her powerfully percussive approach to the flute, Ciciliani has a whole array of cross-techniques to counterattack and complement. Back in Holland, Anne and Marko have worked together to channel Amsterdam's diverse live electronics scene into one of the most vigorous improv venues in Europe, Kraakgeluiden .

Todd Nicholson

Todd Nicholson (bassist and composer) has performed internationally with fellow improvising giants like Billy Bang, Butch Morris and Frank Lowe. Tonight, he presents the premier of his new extended work, Angel Island, which deals with the complex history of the beautiful Californian island that once served as a prison for immigrants. Todd is joined by Gamiel Lyons (flute,) Reut Regev (trombone & flugelhorn,) Andrew Bemkey (piano) & Darrell Greene (drums.)

photo: Makoto Takeuchi

Beth Griffith

Beth Griffith, the stunning, spectacular and tireless contemporary music soprano presents a program that pays tribute to the late, great Morton Feldman. Griffith has collaborated with composers such as Cage, Feldman, Kagel and Stockhausen. Her recording of Feldman's Three Voices won the German Record Critics Prize. Tonight she and dancer/choreographer Peter Schmitz present a collaborative realization of Feldman's Three Voices, and composer/performers Bill Hellermann and Rob Voisey perform Morton Feldman Says, by Robert Ashley.

Michael Harrison

Composer/pianist Michael Harrison performs the complete 90-minute version of REVELATION: for Harmonically Tuned Piano, his epic work for solo piano composed for Roulette and inspired by his lifelong study of North Indian classical music and La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano. Through his expertise in “just intonation” tuning systems and Indian ragas, combined with a deep understanding of Indian and Middle Eastern rhythms, he has created a revolutionary new sound for the piano.

Ellery Eskelin, Andrea Parkins and Jim Black

Ellery Eskelin : composer, tenor saxophone
Andrea Parkins : accordion, piano & sampler
Jim Black : drums & percussion

Phill Niblock

Composer, filmmaker and photographer Phill Niblock, who runs the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in SoHo, writes noble, hypnotic, majestic microtonal drone music for electronics and instruments, guaranteed to mess with your head. Niblock's big 24-track digitally-processed monolithic microtonal drones very gradually change their timbre and pitch characteristics without melody or rhythm, according to an almost imperceptible, geographically slow notion of movement. His recent films are painstaking studies of manual labor, giving a poetic dignity to the sheer grueling slog of fishermen at work, rice-planters, log-splitters, water-hole dredgers and other backbreaking toilers. Beyond the stunning sounds and hypnotic, repetitive images, Niblock deliberately designs systems wherein his materials intersect in unintentional, yet uncanny combinations to which the audience canπt help but superimpose its own meanings and forms.

Nicolas Collins & Peter Cusack

"Music on the Original Instruments"

Longtime musical collaborators Nic Collins ( trombone-propelled electronics) and Peter Cusack (guitar, bouzouki and live electronics) present "Music on the Original Instruments," a happy mashup of buzzing strings and blipping electronics, featuring a bionic bouzouki, bizarrely extended acoustic guitar and rev. 3.1 of trombone-propelled signal processing with a special guest appearance by Jonathan Chen on Stroh violin.

Earl Howard

Earl Howard has been active since the 1970s, has expanding the boundaries of the saxophone, experimenting with electronics, and mixing up composition, improvisation and chance in various proportions. For tonight's show he will perform three solos, all world premieres for Roulette, one on alto sax, another on saxello and finally one on synthesizer. Howard describes the solos as loud, soft, rhythmic, nonrhythmic, clever, witty, serious, and anything else you could reasonably add to the list.