Katinka Kleijn (photo by Sarah Larson)
Caroline Jesalva (photo by PoYu Lee)
Vincent Davis
Erez Dessel
Erez Dessel (USA 1998) is an improvising pianist and composer. After graduating from the New England Conservatory in Boston in 2020, Dessel moved to Savannah, GA, where he served as music director at the Savannah Music Festival Jazz Academy, Savannah’s first and only free after-school youth jazz program. He also kept up an active performing career in the southeast, including presenting an hour-long improvised work for piano, pastel, and paper at the Savannah Cultural Arts Center. He moved to Chicago in 2022, and has worked continuously both as a performer and organizer, recording in an array of contexts with many internationally renowned musicians (including Ken Vandermark, Tim Daisy, Dustin Laurenzi, Maria Elena Silva, and Seajun Kwon). His current group activity includes the bands Edition Redux, Walking Cliche Sextet, and the Thwartet, Maria Elena Silva; duos with Scott Taylor and Tyler Wagner; and work as a solo performer. Dessel created and curates the Night School series at Agitator gallery, which presents video artists and improvising musicians in a spontaneous performance context. Dessel has toured nationally and internationally, including performances in Europe and Korea, and his concerts and recordings have received critical acclaim.
The Improvised Music Series concludes 2024 with a pair of duos demonstrating the strength of the scene across generations.
8:30 pm:
Caroline Jesalva - Violin, voice
Katinka Kleijn - Cello, voice, electronics
9:30 pm:
Vincent Davis - Drums
Erez Dessel - Piano
About the artists
Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she has cultivated an exploratory, interactive practice at the 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 the performance art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in the widely publicized Intelligence in the Human-Machine, 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. A member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble, she performed as soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Hague Philharmonic, the Chicago Sinfonietta, and presented recitals at North Carolina Performing Arts, the Library of Congress, and the Chicago Humanities Festival. She recorded for SONY Japan, Cedille Records and the Drag City labels.
Caroline Jesalva is a genre-fluid violinist and vocalist traversing the worlds of classical performance, improvisation and experimental music. Inspired by Dadaism, her music explores experimental theater, glossolalia, poetry, and free improvisation. Caroline is the co-artistic director of Music in the Garden, an independent concert series for improvisers, creatives, and experimental artists in Chicago, IL. She is also the co-founder of Subject to Change, a national commissioning project to perform, record, and publish new works for two violins by women and gender minorities. As an improviser, Caroline can be seen performing with Banana Acid (Chicago) and Blind Glass (Boston/Chicago).
Vincent Davis, born in Chicago is an internationally acclaimed jazz percussionist, composer and teacher. The seed of music was planted in Davis early, growing up in a home filled with the influences of rock, jazz and gospel. In 1979 Davis left Chicago to attend the Milwaukee Conservatory of Music, where his love of jazz and skill at drumming further bloomed and flourished. It was here that Davis met his mentor Manty Ellis. Davis trained and studied with Ellis, primarily focusing on Jazz trap drumming.
Since 1985, he has belonged to groups of Roscoe Mitchell as his Note Factory and its trio with Harrison Bankhead and Jaribu Shahid , with whom he also toured several times in Europe and Asia and performed at international festivals such as the North Sea Jazz Festival . He is also on Mitchell’s album Songs in the Wind and This Dance is for Steve McCall as well as sound recordings of Jodie Christian and Scott Fields and founded the ensemble Laws of Motion . He also starred with Matthew Shipp , Arthur Blythe , David Murray , Joseph Jarman , Marilyn Crispell , Von Freeman , Hamid Drake , Corey Wilkes , Ed Wilkerson and many other musicians. In the field of jazz Davis participated in thirty recording sessions from 1988 to 2009.