Thursday, April 12, 2018

Adobe Books: April and May, 2018

Usually, Benjamin Ethan Tinker curates one concert per month at Adobe Books. These generally are three-set evenings of live performances of highly adventurous music. However, over the course of the coming five weeks, Tinker will be serving up three events that promise to be of particular interest. As in the past, all of these concerts will take place on a Friday evening; but otherwise there is some variation in what will be offered. Here are the specifics:

April 20, 7 p.m.: This concert has been given its own title: ¡Voltage & Verse! an evening of music and poetry. “Voltage” means, as might be guessed, that the music will be electronic in one way or another. Indeed, the evening will feature a special appearance by one of the pioneers of tape music and electronically synthesized music in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ramon Sender. Sender co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1962 with Morton Subotnick, and he also assisted the late Don Buchla in the design of the latter’s first generation of synthesizers. This was the Buchla 100 series Modular Electronic Music System, generally known as the “Buchla Box,” because the objective was to package all the necessary modules in a single box. A little over two years ago, Other Minds release an album of four pieces that Sender composed between 1962 and 1968, three of which were world premiere recordings.

2011 photograph of Ramon Sender (by Allan J. Cronin, from Wikipedia, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License)

Sender’s will be the only solo set of the evening. He will be preceded and followed by poets reading their work with electronic accompaniment. The opening set will present ruth weiss reading her poems to the electronics of Doug Lynner and Hal Davis. The final set will be taken by the Pitta of the Mind duo with Amanda Chaudhary providing electronic accompaniment to the poetry of Maw Shen Win.

April 27, 7:30 p.m.: This event will also be a special occasion, featuring a performance by 1 + 1, saxophonist Jon Raskin’s duo jamming with saxophonist Phillip Greenlief. They will honor the memory of pioneering saxophonist Steve Lacy, playing music from a rare collection of Lacy’s notebooks. The opening set will be taken by yet another saxophonist, Kevin Robinson leading his KREation Ensemble. This group is usually a twelve-piece band, so Robinson may scale things down due to the limited space in Adobe. On the other hand he may just come up with an imaginative way to deploy his ensemble!

May 18, 7:30 p.m.: This concert will revert to the usual format of three sets with little background information other than hyperlinks: Brenda Hutchinson; Headlights; The Shoes.

Adobe Books is located at 3130 24th Street in the Mission between South Van Ness Avenue and Folsom Street. The gig is free. However, donations will go directly to the performing artists and are strongly encouraged. At past events Adobe has provided free refreshments to those who make a book purchase of $6 or more, and it is likely that the managers of the book store will maintain this effort to encourage reading their offerings.

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