11.6.12 Chris Speed + Jeff Parker + Devin Hoff + Matt Mayhall

Chris Speed is a composer, clarinetist and saxophonist living in Brooklyn, NY. His bands include Human Feel, yeah NO, Trio Iffy , Pachora and The Clarinets. He is a member of Jim Black’s Alas No Axis and John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet.

Speed was born in Seattle in 1967 and graduated from the New England Conservatory in 1990. In 1992 he moved to NYC where he joined Tim Berne’s Bloodcount. Throughout the nineties Speed worked with many pioneering bands in the creative new music/downtown scene including the Dave Douglas Sextet, Myra Melford’s Same River Twice, Erik Freidlander’s Chimera, John Zorn’s Bar Kokhba and Mark Dresser’s trio with Anthony Coleman. During this time he also began pursuing his interest in East European folk music, forming Pachora in 1992, and traveling throughout Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Syria, and Macedonia. Speed is considered one of the leading NYC musicians linking jazz and creative improvisation with Eastern European and Middle Eastern folk music. Currently, he works with Uri Caine’s Bach, Mahler, and Mozart projects, as well as Ben Perowsky’s quartet.

Chris was named the rising star clarinetist in Downbeat magazine for 2004 and 2005. In July 2004 he was the special guest at the Copenhagen International Jazz Festival, working with ten different cutting edge Danish groups. In April 2006, he launched Skirl Records, a label dedicated to Brooklyn based creative music.

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Jeff Parker (b. Bridgeport, Connecticut USA, 4/4/67) is a guitarist, composer, educator, and sculptor of sonic textures.  Since 1990, he has focused on being adaptable in musical environments that are constantly changing; he is an improvising musician.  He is also a composer of instrumental songs.

Recognized as one of contemporary music’s most versatile and innovative electric guitarists, his music is characterized by ideas of angularity and logic, as well as an instantly recognizable tone on the instrument.  He works in a variety of mediums, from Jazz to contemporary music, using ideas informed by innovations and trends in both popular and experimental music.  He creates works that explore and exploit the contrary relationships between tradition and technology, improvisation and composition, and the familiar and the abstract.

His sonic palette may employ techniques from sample-based technologies, analog and digital synthesis, and conventional and extended techniques from his 35 years of playing the guitar.

He is a founding member of the critically acclaimed and innovative groups Isotope 217˚ and Chicago Underground, and a longtime member of the band Tortoise.  He has released several collaborative albums under his own name.  Currently he has been focusing on solitary work and solo performance – to cultivate and establish an idiosyncratic relationship between electronic and acoustic compositional properties in music and sound.

Jeff Parker website

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Devin Hoff works the double bass, the bass guitar, and writes songs. He grew up in Colorado, where he did not learn to fish, hunt, ski, or camp, and he did not go to college.

He is a member of The Nels Cline Singers, Good For Cows, Plays Monk, and the Devin Hoff Platform. In addition, he regularly works with other great musicians, such as Carla Bozulich, Ben Goldberg, Odessa Chen, John Dieterich, Jewlia Eisenberg, Howard Wiley, Steven Bernstein, Carla Kihlstedt, Tony Malaby, Julian Lage, Ron Miles, Mary Halvorson, Jessica Pavone, and many others.

Devin has played on hundreds of recordings and thousands of shows throughout the world. In his spare time he collects (and reads) anarchist books, threatens to become a writer, and volunteers with worthy independent organizations such as the Prisoners Literature Project, the Kate Sharpley Library, and AK Press. He is not now, nor has he ever been, a retired hockey player.

Devin Hoff website

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Most of my schooling was done at the University of Nevada, Reno.  I studied percussion and earned a bachelors and masters degree.  I also taught there for a short while.  I played all kinds of music during my student years in Reno; I gigged frequently with the Reno Philharmonic, Reno Chamber Orchestra, and Nevada Opera, and got into playing jazz pretty heavily. I also played lots of rock music, most notably with a band called Big In Japan.

I moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 2004.  I freelanced for a couple of years, then went back to school for an MFA in Jazz Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, where I studied drums with Joe LaBarbera and improvisation with Charlie Haden and Wadada Leo Smith.

In Los Angeles, I work with a pretty diverse range of artists, but mostly under the umbrellas of jazz and popular music.  In 2010, I independently recorded and released my first album as a leader, which includes some music that I composed.  It’s called Bleed and it was created in collaboration with two of my very close friends and favorite players; Adam Benjamin on piano and Sam Minaie on bass.  You can download this record at bandcamp.

Some other people I work with include guitarist/composer Anthony Wilson, avant-garde multi-instrumentalist Vinny Golia, visual/performance artist Mike Kelley, saxophonist Peter Epstein, the band Spain, indie-folk singer-songwriter Patrick Park, jazz vocalist/songwriter Kathleen Grace, chanteuse (did I just use that word?) Miranda Lee Richards, and mega-pop singer Lenka, with whom I performed on Late Night with Conan O’Brien when that was still a show.

As a music educator, I teach private drum lessons regularly, but I’ve also taught lessons and lecture courses at the college level at the University of Nevada Reno, and also CalArts’ Community Arts Partnership, the University of California San Diego Summer Jazz Camp and the Academy of Creative Education.

Matt Mayhall website