Community Jam Session with the Quiet Trance Ensemble, featuring Daniel Gray-Kontar

Admission: Free; bring a noise making device of your choosing and be ready to make music!

The Quiet Trance Ensemble, led by Chris Auerbach-Brown, is a contemporary music group devoted to performances of contemplative, subtle music which takes risks and challenges listeners. A combination of local experimental/electronic musicians plus musicians who specialize in performing new music, the QTE embraces a wide creative spectrum, from free improvisation to performing intricate, fully notated works of contemporary music.

QTE hosts its first 'community jam session,' free for anyone to attend. The only requirements: to bring a found object or two that is capable of making interesting sounds (this could be anything), to bring an open mind, and be willing to engage openly in the improvisational process with the ensemble's musicians. Also included on the concert are two premieres: my Tabletop Neumes and my String Quartet No. 2.

Local poet and community activist Daniel Gray-Kontar will lead discussions on a variety of issues, using participants' personal noisemakers as a starting point for open conversations about 'found history,' family, neighborhood, and other topics of community. In this way, QTE and Gray-Kontar aspire to use music and open dialogue as a hammer, an agent of positive social change.

QTE performers include:
Bbob Drake, electronics and other wizardry
David Russell Stempowski - found objects and electronics
Chris Auerbach-Brown - saxophone, musical saw, found objects
Daniel Gray-Kontar - turntables, facilitator
Sarah Page - violin
Julian Machcala - violin
Eva Kennedy - viola
Sophie Benn - cello

Images from installation Boundaries at SPACES Gallery, 11/18/11 - 1/20/12. Line in the Sand (picture of microphone preamps in Altoids tins). All photos by Jerry Mann.