Mark Dresser & Raz Mesinai

Bassist/composer Mark Dresser & composer/electronicist Raz Mesinai team up to tear wide open the first night of Roulette’s season. Mesinai's music combines modern composition, freeform electronics and ancient shamanic and trance traditions, drawing on his background in the hip-hop and dub scenes and in traditional Middle Eastern musics. Of Dresser’s playing, The New Yorker writes, “You've got to pity Dresser's poor bass -- you wouldn't treat a dog the way he manhandles his instrument. But the gnarled tones and vicious swing he tortures out of it are worth the abuse.  In Dresser's slanted compositions, the jazz tradition is only so much grist for the mill…" Tonight Dresser and Mesinai perform new compositions for double bass and electronics using everything from processed overtones, layered harmonics and artificial room tones to vibrating goatskins…

Mark Dresser has performed and recorded over one hundred CDs with some of the strongest personalities in contemporary music and jazz including Ray Anderson, Tim Berne, Jane Ira Bloom, Bobby Bradford, Tom Cora, Marilyn Crispell, Anthony Davis, Dave Douglas, Fred Frith, Diamanda Galas, Vinny Golia, Earl Howard, Oliver Lake, George Lewis, Misha Mengelberg, Ikue Mori, James Newton, Evan Parker, Sonny Simmons, Louis Sclavis, Vladimir Tarasov, Henry Threadgill, and John Zorn. He was nominated for a 2003 Grammy for the performance of Osvaldo Golijov's CD, Yiddishbbuk. (EMI). He has given lecture demonstrations at the Julliard School, Princeton, New England Conservatory, National Superior Conservatory of Paris, Conservatory of Amsterdam, UCSD, and many others. He has been on faculty at New School University, Hampshire College, and was a 2004 Lecturer in the Council of Humanities and Department of Music at Princeton University. He is professor of music at UCSD.

Raz Mesinai was born in Jerusalem in 1973. His first two decades were spent in frequent transit between Jerusalem and New York City, where he became immersed in both the worlds of traditional Middle Eastern music, and the dub and hip-hop scenes of the eighties and early nineties in New York City. He became involved in the avant-garde, downtown music scene of New York City, performing, improvising, and leading his own ensembles on percussion, piano and sampler.

Mesinai's electronic and electro-acoustic music exists at the crossroads of composition, sound design and modern studio production. His acclaimed recordings under the moniker Badawi, and as one half of the seminal duo Sub Dub (with John Ward), are difficult to classify, but have been called hybrid electronica/dub/percussion/avant-garde compositions. Since 1999, Mesinai has been releasing music under his own name as well, including three releases on John Zorn's "Tzadik" label...

Peeesseye

PEEESSEYE: Jaime Fennelly, Chris Forsyth & Fritz Welch Peeesseye and its many offshoots (‘Phantom Limb & Bison’ and ‘Pee in My Face With Surgery’) have been slinging mud and clawing at the foundations of the experimental noise underground for years, exploring the boundaries of their instruments (analogue electronics, oscillators, vocals, guitars and percussion) and the acoustical space they inhabit. Their unclassifiable music has been variously characterized by certain sage voices as “coming off like a punk rock AMM” (The Wire), “a deep black/bleak folk ritual, with the good sense to not call itself by some ‘adjective folk’ genre name,” (Blastitude) and like “a slightly more western canon focused Sun City Girls” (Volcanic Tongue). More at www.evolvingear.com.

Wally Shoup
with Reuben Radding, Brent Arnold & Toshi Makihara
“One of the alto saxophone’s harshest poets,” (The Boston Phoenix) Wally Shoup plays unfettered, emotion-laden alto sax. His work combines the grit of free jazz and blues with an ear towards lyrical abstraction, all at the service of creating coherent music in the moment. Tonight with Radding
(bass), Arnold (cello) and Makihara (drums,) his quartet presents music that is a lively, often intense blend of free jazz, contemporary string music & zen-like percussion. As a collective, they create a high degree of cohesion and uncanny telepathic interplay, resulting in the type of free-wheeling
improvisation that sounds composed, yet remains fluid and unpredictable.

Lily Maase - re:Disconnect

Guitarist, composer, and mixed media artist Lily Maase teams up with laptop artist extraordinaire Christian Pincock to present re:Disconnect, her latest experiment in sonic architecture. re:Disconnect is part chamber performance, part multimedia installation, part long-form work for improvising musicians in double quintet. Listeners will find themselves immersed in music from all directions as Maase and Pincock use a room-wide laptop installation to blur the line between performer and audience, form and improvisation, texture and the indistinct. 

The performance will feature Maase on guitar, Pincock on laptop and trombone, Shane Endsley on trumpet, Mike Maher on trumpet and voice, Evan Smith and Montreal-based Adam Kinner on saxophones, Zach Brock on amplified five-string violin, Matt Wigton and Jay Foote on bass, and Fred Kennedy and Jason Nazary on drums.

Maase’s music is a fusion of rock and the avant-garde. All About Jazz describes her work as being “as much about artistic vision as about a groove you can feel. At times soft and plaintive, the music can change gears and grow into a powerful wall of sound…extremely emotionally and cerebrally rewarding." The Weekly Alibi has praised her “killer technique” and “fearless sense of fun.”

Check out: www.lilymaase.com.

The ULLMANN/SWELL 4

The Ullmann/Swell 4 is Gebhard Ullmann (winds,) trombonist Steve Swell, bassist Hill Greene & legendary drummer Barry Altschul. This emotional and intense quartet has toured the U.S. and Canada and recorded their first CD, Desert Songs and Other Landscapes, for the CIMP label in 2004. In October and November of 2006 The Ullmann/Swell 4 will be performing in Europe for the first time. The road-tested results that define their absorbing compositions verify the group’s deep commitment to the idea that a music based on earnest communication proves most compelling.

Shelley Hirsch & Simon Ho

Hirsch (voice) and Ho (keyboards) have composed an evocative & playful suite of pieces, filled with sonic pictures, kooky autobiographical tales & beautiful orchestrations. Their collaborative work will be performed by an extraordinary ensemble of musicians, who bring the written music to life … and augment it with their unique talents as improvisers. With Stephanie Griffin (viola), David Hofstra (bass, tuba), David Simons (percussion, theremin) & Tomas Ulrich (cello.) *Name the group after you hear the music and win 2 CDS!!!*

Kenny Wollesen - WOLLESONIC

WOLLESONIC is an acousto-electro multi-instrumental vibrational outfit of skilled musicians adept at spontaneity and sonics, featuring Kenny Wollesen (percussion), On Davis (guitar) and many special guests. Their performance tonight will be accompanied by multiple super 8 projections and rotorific projections.Wollesen is renowned as an artist of astonishing versatility, skill, and ingenuity. He has recorded and toured with all kinds of musicians, from Tom Waits (w/William S. Burroughs), to Sean Lennon, to Ron Sexsmith. A founding member of the New Klezmer Trio, Wollesen is all over NYC's downtown jazz and avant-garde scene, touring with Bill Frisell & Myra Melford, recording for Tzadik and improvising at major venues throughout the city.