Keith Eisenbrey: Preludes in Seattle, Part 4

8:00 PM; $5 - $15 sliding scale suggested donation at the door (cash/checks only).

Seattle composer/pianist Keith Eisenbrey continues his tour through the Prelude cycles of Seattle composers Ken Benshoof, Greg Short, and Lockrem Johnson. In addition he will perform the entirety of his own cycle of 24 Preludes for Piano (2009 - 2011).

Eisenbrey brings to his pianism a composer's imaginative musical understanding, and to his composition a mysterious and majestical whimsy. Cerebral and sensuous, remorselessly speculative, his music seeks to illuminate those most intimate of our personal spaces: the silences across which, in which, and out from which music, thought, and utterance unfold. His oeuvres includes solo pieces for various keyboards, songs, and chamber works. He studied composition with Dell Wade, Ken Benshoof, John Rahn, and Benjamin Boretz, and piano with Victor Smiley, Joan Purswell, and Neal O'Doan. He is a charter member of The Barrytown Orchestra, an interactive music-making ensemble based in Barrytown, New York, and is a co-founder of Banned Rehearsal, an ongoing argument in creative musical expression, now in it’s 29th year. His critical and theoretical work has appeared in Perspectives of New Music, News of Music, and Open Space, and he assisted in the editing of Boretz’s Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought for its republication.

Earshot: Phil Dadson & friends

7:30 PM; $12 general/$10 Earshot members & seniors/$6 students (advance tickets online, or at the door). Presented by Earshot Jazz Festival.

In terms of pure sound, I am attracted to intricate texture; the microscopic, the unexpected, the naturally rhythmic and the adventurous; to sound atmospheres and layered perspectives, to sounds that conjure mood and imagination, that convey ideas and express the human heart and soul.

New Zealand home-made-instrument innovator Phil Dadson performs with three inventive Seattle soundscapers: Bill Horist, Paul Kikuchi and Steve Barsotti.

Dadson is a sound installation artist, solo performer, experimental instrument maker and composer. He is the founder of the sound-performance group From Scratch (1974 - 2002), which developed an international reputation for an innovative sound and performance style that included sculptural, ritual and theatrical elements with large, custom-built plastic instruments and industrial and natural materials. He is co-author of the From Scratch Rhythm Workbook and Slap Tubes and Other Plosive Instruments, a DIY guide to building a variety of slap tube instruments.

Since 1990 he has received many major awards and commissions, including a Fulbright travel award to the U.S., and research, exhibition and performance grants to Canada, Japan, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, Hungary, Austria, UK, India and Argentina. A New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate Award in 2001 led Dadson to further expand – in festival appearances, various new commissions; an Artist-to-Antarctica fellowship; and recently, a 2011 expedition of nine artists into the South Pacific, called the Kermadec Ocean Project, to produce works in support of a Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary.

Earshot: Evan Flory-Barnes, 2 + 2

7:30 PM; $14 general/$12 Earshot members & seniors/$7 students (advance tickets online, or at the door). Presented by Earshot Jazz Festival.

The featured artist of this year’s festival is one of Puget Sound’s most expansive creators. Here, bassist and composer Evan Flory-Barnes explores new musical possibilities with stellar Seattle Jazz Hall of Fame bassist Jeff Johnson and expressive pianist Dawn Clement, in one of Seattle’s greatest acoustic spaces.