Improvised Music Series: Naima Nefertari, Shook/Young/Billington

Name: Improvised Music Series: Naima Nefertari, Shook/Young/Billington — Elastic Arts Foundation
Start: 2024-01-18T20:30:00-0600
End: 2024-01-18T23:15:00-0600

Thursday, January 18, 2024
8:30 PM 11:15 PM

Google Calendar ICS

At this week’s Improvised Music Series we welcome to out-of-towner’s to our stage. Naima Nefertari (aka Karlsson) is back to Elastic from the UK to present a solo piano performance. Her piano work weaves sonic and visual forms led by interests in repetition, improvisation, and relationships between language, image, symbol and sound. Following Naima’s set we’ll hear a first time meeting from Oakland-based saxophonist Wilson Shook, bassist Andrew Scott Young, and Ben Billington on synthesizer/percussion. Music at 8:30pm!

8:30PM Set 1: Naima Nefertari
Naima Nefertari - Piano

9:30PM Set 2: Shook/Young/Billington
Wilson Shook - Saxophone
Andrew Scott Young - Bass
Ben Billington - Synthesizer/Percussion

$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door

Artist Bios

Naima Nefertari (aka Karlsson) is a interdisciplinary artist, musician and composer based in London and Sweden. Her practice weaves sonic and visual forms led by interests in repetition, improvisation, and relationships between language, image, symbol and sound. Naima’s main instrument is the piano, as well as percussion, vibraphone, and organ. Improvisation is at the core of the artist’s musical process, combined with minimalist uses of tone and an inherently organic approach to playing - calling on concepts of “Organic Music” proposed independently by two major influences to the artist: the composer Julius Eastman (1940-90), and her grandfather the jazz musician Don Cherry (1936-95). Naima is part of Exotic Sin duo with Japanese multi-instrumentalist Kenichi Iwasa, and she is currently working on a duo album with Angel Bat Dawid. Naima is also an archivist and manager for the Estate of Moki Cherry and Cherry archive.

Wilson Shook is an improvising saxophonist and manual therapist living in Oakland, CA since 2022. His approach to music has been shaped by collaborative relationships with Gust Burns, Paul Hoskin, Ben Bennett, Greg Kelley, Carol Genetti, Ted Byrnes, and others, as well as an ongoing sonic exploration of the resonant void spaces of American hydrologic and transportation infrastructure. For ten years Wilson helped to organize the performance space Gallery 1412 in Seattle, and has a long association with the Seattle Improvised Music Festival.
A self-taught musician, Wilson approaches improvisation, study, collaboration, and performance as sites of radical experimentation with modes of being, relating, and perceiving. Wilson’s practice cultivates an awareness of human vulnerability and technological fallibility; embraces excess, fragmentation, and incompleteness; and pursues the chaotic, queer, and interdependent imperatives of aleatory existence amidst a crumbling, toxic culture.
Attentiveness, transformation, commitment to the materiality of the musical act and its consequences; radical presence as the only avenue of escape. Always mindful of the axiom, via Éluard—There is another world, but it is in this one.

Home Page: http://www.otherghosts.net/
Bandcamp: https://otherghosts.bandcamp.com/