#improvisation

#improvisation

In its sixth year, New York City's Prismatic Ground festival doesn't show any signs of rote predictability. Founder and programmer Inney Prakash has used the festival, which most recently took place from April 29 through May 3, to foreground global voices in the contemporary avant-garde. He likens his curatorial process to "conducting a piece of music or slaloming down a mountain," but otherwise prefers to let the viewer parse threads and connections between the films he programs across four separate waves.

In 2023, she begged for time in Smith's shuttered archives, discovering hours of non-American music, before learning to perform and share it. Marisa Anderson: The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music Vol 1 Here, Anderson interprets nine of these tunes, pointedly taken from regions shaped by major US conflicts since her birth in 1970. While her fascinating liner notes track what is lost and found when trying to translate these compositions, their universal musicality still cuts through.

Jozef Van Wissem owns a sonic arsenal of eight string instruments, each bespoke and featuring remarkable characteristics, contributing to his extensive body of work with nearly 50 titles.

In the history of cinema, there has never been a single script. It is a pervasive myth that film-making requires screenplays; in fact, most scenes are made up on the spot.

Intense listening capabilities from these exquisite players which required, more than anything else, a great deal of trust. They posited about thematic structures, which somehow got agreed upon, live in the moment through a collective groupthink. Right there on stage. No words spoken, just an exchange of bizarrely intense looks. Ranging from 'we're almost there' to 'don't you dare.' That's trust, people.

One of the more unexpected musical evolutions in recent years has been that of Hen Ogledd from the group's origins as a side project for harpist Rhodri Davies and singer-guitarist Richard Dawson. The knotty, writhing improvisations of the pair's 2013 album Dawson-Davies: Hen Ogledd were like wrestling a piglet in a barbed wire jacket, but with the addition of multi-instrumentalists Dawn Bothwell and Sally Pilkington, by the time of 2018's Mogic, Hen Ogledd had become a bold, poppy but still defiantly experimental quartet.

Yet, at least one time, it was. This is a story I heard from Dave Hannaman, who worked at an Army human resources organization when I met with him many years ago. (Dave died in 2021.) Dave had been in the Army, including a stint as a "tunnel rat" in Vietnam. He was one of the brave soldiers who would go down into the tunnels the Viet Cong had constructed and booby-trapped. He was that kind of guy.

Often I'm thinking about the problem of articulating a surface in such a way that it forces the eye to move over the painting in a particular way. The eye can get blocked at junctions: elbows, knees, ankles, etc. So I look for paths that run across the form in order to connect them. I often deviate from anatomical accuracy in order to generate compositional tension. There are also details that command the eye with psycho(sexual) compulsion: lips, ears, nipples, fingertips, eyes etc. I will use the bulges and indentations of musculature as an inflection point to modulate the impact of those signifiers.

Thurston Moore is obsessed with jazz. Not the mellow, easy-listening variety that serves as background music in elevators and waiting rooms. No, Moore goes for the hard stuff: wailing saxophones, arrhythmic bass lines, drums that follow beats so out of time they might as well come from the deepest reaches of space. Call it broadcasts from Planet Jazz. We're talking free jazz, an experiment in improvisational music that captivated the world's greatest jazz musicians in the second half of the 20th century.

Much to the delight of dead-eyed, toothy-grinned CEOs, AI is steadily coiling around the music industry's throat. It's ubiquitous: Hip-hop producers are turning computer-concocted samples into viral sensations, record labels are licensing their catalogs to companies like Klay and Udio, and data-center slop is topping the country charts. It's so woven into our reality, it wouldn't be surprising to see a troupe of brewery chooglers cover a Velvet Sundown song sometime soon.

On a Tuesday night in Atwater Village, Teresa "Toogie" Barcelo is creating a portal. With her arms stretched out, she beckons the participants of her movement workshop, Wiggle Room, to join her on the other side, where they will meet a renewed version of themselves. "Walk into the next iteration of yourself," she commands. The participants, who have spent the last hour squirming, shaking and humming, cross the invisible threshold. Their limbs swing loosely, their smiling faces sticky with sweat.

"She's so funny, she improvs so much," Sennott says. "She was like, 'Can I have a mullet and a bedazzled vape and a British accent?' And I was like, 'Go off. Go off, girl.' I love her so much as a friend and also to collaborate with 'cause she brings so much to the table."

Over the past two decades, the Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto has developed a unique performance/installation practice in which she produces installations of absurd sculptural devices-from haemorrhoid cushions to oversized fishing lures-that, in turn, serve as an object-based score and environment for improvised performances that combine humorous spoken narratives with physical actions and mark-making. The artist's first mid-career survey, Aki Sasamoto's Life Laboratory at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), traces the evolution of this practice through a sharp combination of installations, documentation and live performances.

But Prescott, Arizona's Spafford walks the talk. The jam band, co-founded in 2009 by songwriter Brian Moss, has released six studio albums and at least a dozen live albums, all without the infrastructure of a record label. A popular fixture on the festival circuit, Spafford has played at many high-profile events, including Bonnaroo, and Peach Music Festival. The group's eclectic approach is built on improvisation and adapting covers to their own style.

Some bands use a variety of traditional instruments to make music and then there are Sirom. A trio that formed a decade ago over interests in post-rock and drone (their name means around or widely in their native Slovenian), they list more than two dozen instruments in the liner notes of their fifth album, from the Persian gheychak to the Mongolian morin khuur. They create a palette that's kaleidoscopic in its textural, dynamic and melodic explorations of sound.

A comedian takes five shots of whiskey in a row and tries to perform an improvised play with sober comedians. What could go wrong?! Drunk Theatre is the entirely improvised, unpredictable, and crazy comedy show that'll kick your weekend into overdrive. See what the SF Chronicle, CBS, LA Times, SF Weekly, SFGate, Thrillist, and TimeOut have all been talking about.

Orcutt begins to stutter, start, and stop only 40 seconds into "An L.A. Funeral," his wild leaps between notes prompting Miller and Shelley to shift their approach and give him more space. "Wedding" is a gentle little drift for nearly two minutes, but, when Orcutt suddenly grabs a note and squeezes it like he's trying to strangle the truth from its squeal, Miller and Orcutt shift again, their linear rhythm becoming a circle, a pas de deux as they wait for their third to work through his rage.

Born with albinism in 1936, Pascoal grew up in a small rural town in the Brazilian state of Alagoas. His parents worked in the fields, but the young Pascoal spent much of his time indoors due to his condition. While vision deficiencies led him to drop out of school in the fourth grade, Pascoal's ears guided him towards music. He learned to play accordion, flute and piano.

"I feel a lot less crazy there, as you learn the ups and downs and how to just genuinely enjoy it. Comedy is at its best when you're being loose and at its worst when you're really tense and overthinking things. All my best stuff I've ever gotten on the show has been Plan D or 'I don't know, how about this?' It's not the thing I'd spent all night meticulously trying to make work."

The potential for chaos at jazz festivals often stems from the unique situations created when local musicians augment visiting ensembles, demonstrating skill and adaptability.

Gonzalo fuses his architectural roots with a fearless, hands-on spirit-one that thrives on texture, contrast, and the thrill of the unexpected.