Night 1 of our February residency with Edition 55, the most recent of Ken Vandermark's ensembles. The group is an addition to an ongoing series of bands that have been internationally and critically acclaimed, which include The Vandermark 5, FME, The Resonance Ensemble, The Territory Band, Made To Break, and Marker. In addition to Vandermark, who plays saxophones and clarinets with the group, this quintet is comprised of Lily Finnegan (drums), Katinka Kleijn (cello/electronics), Nick Macri (acoustic and electric bass), and Beth McDonald (tuba/electronics).
The music of Edition 55 includes the range of Vandermark's interests and influences, incorporating the experimental jazz of the AACM; the different schools of improvised music based in England, Netherlands, and Germany; post-punk, Tropicalia, dub, and funk. The band debuted at the Catalytic Sound Festival held in Chicago on December 2nd, 2022 and has a concert schedule planned for 2023 that includes a weekly residency at Elastic Arts in Chicago during February, a U.S. tour in April, and a tour in Europe during November. Also taking place in April is the group's first recording, which will be released later in time for its initial trip overseas.
2 SETS!
INDIVIDUAL BIOS
Ken Vandermark: Ken Vandermark (USA 1964) is an improvising musician and composer who plays tenor and baritone saxophone, Bb and bass clarinet. He moved to Chicago from Boston in 1989, and has worked from the early 1990s onward, both as a performer and organizer in North America and Europe, recording in an array of contexts with many internationally renowned musicians (such as Fred Anderson, Ab Baars, Peter Brötzmann, Sylvie Courvoisier, Tim Daisy, Kris Davis, Dieb 13, Hamid Drake, Terrie Ex, Mats Gustafsson, Elisabeth Harnik, Steve Heather, Didi Kern, Kent Kessler, Christof Kurzmann, Paul Lytton, Joe McPhee, Andy Moor, Jason Moran, Ikue Mori, Joe Morris, Paal Nilssen-Love, Eddie Prevóst, Mette Rasmussen, Tom Rainey, Eric Revis, Jasper Stadhouders, Chad Taylor, John Tilbury, Mars Williams, and Nate Wooley).
His current group activity includes the bands Bent Atlas, Lean Left, The DKV Trio, DEK, his large ensemble Entr'acte, the ongoing Momentum projects; duos with Terrie Ex, Christof Kurzmann, Damon Locks, Paal Nilssen-Love, Mars Williams, and Nate Wooley; and work as a solo performer. Ken co-founded Catalytic Sound in 2012, an organization dedicated to the economic sustainability of creative improvising musicians, and since then has been its director. In 2014 he began Audiographic Records, an independent music label. Since June of 2015 Ken has been co-curator of Option, a music and interview series held at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Half of each year is spent touring in Europe, North America, Latin America, and Japan; his concerts and numerous recordings have been critically acclaimed at home and abroad. Ken's activity as a writer includes liner notes for a variety of recordings; and contributions to the eighth edition of John Zorn's Arcana: musicians on music, the music journal Sound American, the Spanish language periodical, "El Estado Mental," and "Catalytic Quarterly." In 1999 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in music.
Lily Finnegan: Lily Glick Finnegan is a Chicago born and based drummer, composer and improviser. In 2021 she earned a Master of Music from Berklee College of Music in Boston Massachusetts. She received a full scholarship to participate in the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, a 20 person international cadre of musicians led by Danilo Perez. At Berklee she was also part of the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. Here she was mentored by Terri Lyne Carrington, Kris Davis, and Linda May Han Oh. She’s worked on projects with Carrington including Music for Abolition as part of the Visualizing Abolition Exhibit at University of California Santa Cruz. Her thesis project was entitled “Music and Abolition: Creating a World Without Policing- Music’s Role in Imagination, Experimentation, and Collectivity”. Prior, she completed a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020, majoring in sociology and music. This fueled her interest in studying the confluence between power structures, history, and social movements with music.
In 2022 Lily returned to Chicago. New projects in this city have included the Ken Vandermark Quintet, Sarah Clausen Trio, Shoulderbird, and her own self led trio. She has collaborated with artists and bands including Kris Davis, Ben Lamar Gay, Ken Vandermark, Jason Stein, Dave Rempis, Katinka Kleijn, Deodorant, Shoulderbird, Lea Delaria, Christof Kurzmann, Hanah Jon Taylor, and Katie Ernst. Currently she is the record store manager of Catalytic Sound, an experimental music cooperative.
Katinka Kleijn: Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” Dutch-born cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she has cultivated an exploratory, interactive creative practice at the fertile intersection of improvisation, composition, and collaboration. Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts (Water On the Bridge, The Body as a Variable Resistor, RESIDUUM). Her collaborations with composer Daniel Dehaan and the Chicago-based performance art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in the widely publicized Intelligence in the Human-Machine (2014), a duet between Kleijn’s cello and her own brainwaves which Time magazine called “a balancing act for Kleijn’s whole body.” Kleijn presents many of her conceptual projects as co-constructions with the performer(s) or audience, as in her situation-based composition Forward Echo, for 11 improvisers (2019), performed at Big Ears Festival by Ensemble Dal Niente, and her silent video project Screenplay in 4 (2021). Kleijn is a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble. She has performed as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Hague Philharmonic, and the Chicago Sinfonietta, and presented solo multimedia presentations at the Library of Congress, North Carolina Performing Arts, and the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Kleijn’s 2016 world premiere performance of Dai Fujikura’s cello concerto at Lincoln Center was released by SONY Japan. A Drag City recording artist, she has improvised with musicians like Bill MacKay, Ken Vandermark, Lia Kohl, Joe McPhee, Caroline Davis, Mark Feldman, and Du Yun.
Nick Macri: Bassist Nick Macri has been exploring Chicago’s slipstream of creative music for decades from collaborative, creative groups and ad hoc improvised pairings, to notable sideman gigs, and the rare solo excursion. He is a founding member of the collective trio Stirrup with Fred Lonberg-Holm and Charles Rumback and is/was a contributing member to many, varied groups including Ken Vandermark’s Audio One, instrumental explorers Euphone and Heroic Doses, art-pop quartet The Zincs, and the pastoral, psych-folk of The Horse's Ha (with Janet Bean and James Elkington). He has performed and toured as a sideman and recorded sessions with an eclectic list of artists including Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab, The Sea and Cake, Daughter of Swords, Nina Nastasia, Azita, Nathan Salsburg, Joan Shelley, Wanees Zarour, Hector Zazou, and visual artist Bruce Licher of Savage Republic. Additionally, he has improvised in duo or group settings with various musicians including Angel Bat Dawid, Bill MacKay, Eve Risser, Isaiah Collier, Avreeayl Ra, Sylvaine Hélary, Tim Daisy, and many more. He has performed across Europe, Asia, South America, and North America including concerts at Saalfelden Jazz Festival (Austria), Festival de Musique Actuelle Victoriaville (Canada), Reading Festival and Leeds Festival (U.K.), World Music Festival Chicago, All Tomorrow's Parties (U.K.), the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Logan Center, and the Pritzker Pavilion (Chicago).
Beth McDonald: is a classically trained tuba player gone awry. She performs mainly as an improviser, using the tuba acoustically and with electronic effects pedals. Densing (2021), her most recent album, uses tuba and electronics in conjunction with natural acoustic resonance to build up unpredictable new layers of sound. The CD version of the album was packaged in handmade felted wool, which was created through an analogous physical process of layering. Beth's next solo album, a continuation and expansion of the Densing project, will be released in mid-2023.
While the pandemic put many of her musical projects on pause, collaboration is an integral part of Beth's musical practice – working with musicians as well as with artists and performers in other mediums. Some notable past collaborators include Becky Grajeda, Ethan T. Parcell, Sasha de Koninck, Eli Wallace, Isaac Turner, Franki Hand, Matt Samolis, Ben Zucker, Nathanael Lee Jones, and Mark Booth.
In a previous musical life, Beth toured as a contemporary classical musician, chamber musician, and soloist. She also participated in orchestral academies at the Lucerne Festival, Aspen Music Festival, and the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, and was on staff at the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice. Beth holds degrees from New England Conservatory, Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Kentucky.
$15 - Tickets Available at the Door