The Semana Internacional de Improvisación is a unique festival in Ensenada, Mexico that has been running for almost 10 years, directed by my wonderful friends Wilfrido Terrazas, Esther Gamez and Iván Trujillo. It was joy to participate this year as a guest artist, presenting a concert with an ensemble of great improvisers from Ensenada including … Read more
I’m grateful to have been able to spend three weeks in Bogotá, Colombia in September, thanks to a residency supported US Fulbright Specialist Program and the Jazz emphasis in the Faculty of Arts at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. The wonderful bassist-composer-improviser Santiago Botero helped set all this up, and at La Javeriana I taught and performed … Read more
I’ve been collaborating with my good friend Jason Robinson for 25 years, including over a dozen in the collective quartet Cosmologic along with Scott Walton and Nathan Hubbard, and many other bands. Jason’s latest project is a double album of new compositions with a quintet featuring Joshua White, Drew Gress and Chess Smith, that we … Read more
I recently enjoyed playing a concert with Iván Trujillo’s quartet, featuring Yamil Almaguer and Gabri Grijalva, on a beautiful afternoon in the Jardin Botánico of the Centro Cultural Tijuana. It was refreshing to be able to play for such a multi-generational audience, including children!
It was a joy to perform again with the Mark Dresser 7, and on the Vision Festival held at Roulette in NYC. Mark’s multidimensional music, which we’ve recorded on a couple albums on Clean Feed Records in recent years, is always worth the effort to put together, and we had a really fun set. You … Read more
Since 2015, I’ve been collaborating on concerts and events within the Tele-Espacios Activos series that Mario Humberto Valencia directs each year within the Festival Internacional de la Imagen in Manizales, Colombia. This year I traveled to Colombia – my first time returning there since before the pandemic – to co-direct and perform on a telematic … Read more
I always enjoy working with students and teachers in the Santa Ana High School music program, especially the Puentes Telemáticos / Telematic Bridges program that I co-direct in summers. This year, I also did some workshops with their jazz big band and performed with them on their spring concert, which featured some UCI students playing … Read more
It was a powerful experience performing a soundscape for this recent durational performance created by artist Mariángeles Soto-Díaz at Grand Central Arts Center in Santa Ana, CA. I created an algorithmic sonic collage based on her direction, which included audio samples from marches that were part of the #niunamenos movement protesting femicide in Latin America, … Read more
I recently had the privilege to co-direct two telematic concerts from the black box theatre at UC San Diego, with wonderful collaborators in New York and Korea. On Feb. 2nd, we performed with Fay Victor, Ingrid Laubrock, and Patricia Brennan at Roulette in NYC, with Mark Dresser, Gerald Cleaver, Joshua White and myself performing from … Read more
I had a great time playing yesterday in Tijuana with an 8-piece band led by the wonderful creative trumpeter Iván Trujillo, who was invited by the Centro Cultural Tijuana to present a “Binational Jazz” concert as part of a series of events celebrating the bicentennial anniversary of diplomatic relations between Mexico and the US. In … Read more
Since 2015, I have enjoyed participating in Mario Valencia’s “Tele-Espacios Activos” series within the Festival Internacional de la Imagen, sometimes in person in Manizales, Colombia and in other years performing remotely from California. I missed being there in person this year but it was still a pleasure to perform on the concert, this time improvising … Read more
I recently collaborated on sound for this excellent new project by artist Mariángeles Soto-Díaz at Grand Central Arts Center in Santa Ana, CA. Soto-Díaz composed and directed a unique performance that took place within her art installation and featured four black belt judokas, two art performers, and original sounds including texts she wrote along with … Read more