"I currently live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I grew up in Long Beach CA. Mother was an artist, father a labor organizer.

On heavy rotation at home as a youngster was Dave Brubeck, Ramsey Lewis, Paul Desmond, the Beatles and Rolling stones..

As a teenager I was listening to alot of speed metal, punk rock, heavy metal and jazz.

I decided to dedicate my life to music after hearing John Coltrane. I hoped to one day give others the feeling I felt when hearing his music, perhaps an impossible goal, but a journey worth making as far as I can tell.

I earned a BA in music at Cal State Long Beach with an emphasis on classical saxophone performance where I had the pleasure of studying with Leo Potts, John Prince and many other great musicians.

I then earned an MFA at California Institute of the Arts in Jazz performance where I studied with many masters including Wadada Leo Smith, Paul Novros, Larry Koonse, Joe Labarbera, Charlie Haden and Pedro Eustache. At Cal Arts I also had the fortune to study music from Bali, Java, Ghana, and India. I have more recently studied and performed Japanese Gagaku music as well.

Since graduating from Cal Arts, I have had the pleasure of making music with a wide variety of amazing musicians including Wadada Leo Smith, Peter Kowald, John Butcher, Donald Robinson, Marco Eneidi, Weasel Walter, Adam Lane, Aphrodesia, Lagos-Roots, Mykal Rose, The Rova Saxophone Quartet, William Hooker and many others. I lead my own groups Go-Go-Fightmaster, electro-magnetic trans-personal orchestra and I currently perform in the Oakland Active Orchestra , Lisa Mezzacappa's Bait & Switch, Vijay Anderson Quartet, Guerilla Hi-Fi Black Water Gold, and Touch and Go Sextet I have been very fortunate to have performed in many great clubs and festivals across the U.S. and abroad including recent appearances at the Monterey Jazz Festival and the Novarra Jazz Festival in Italy. I have composed for large ensembles, chamber groups, plays, films, dance performances, wind quintet, saxophone quartets and trios as well as pieces for solo instruments."

-Aaron Bennett Website (http://www.aarondavidbennett.com/about.php)
11/29/2024

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"John is an engineer and multi-instrumentalist. He has studied engineering with Myles Boisen, guitar with Morris Acevedo, Myles Boisen, and Richard Festinger, and musical drinking straw with Aaron Bennett. John has worked on records with Fred Frith, Crime, Knights of the New Crusade, Tango No. 9, Aphrodesia, Edmund Welles, and many others. He plays guitar in many bands, including Go-Go Fightmaster and Bait and Switch."

-New, Improved Recording (http://newimprovedrecording.com/?page_id=137)
11/29/2024

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"Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco Bay Area-based bassist, bandleader, composer, curator and producer. An active collaborator in the Bay Area music community for more than a dozen years, she leads her own groups Bait & Switch, the Interlopers, Nightshade, Eartheaters and the Lisa Mezzacappa Trio, and co-leads the ensembles BODABODA, duo B., Cylinder, the Mezzacappa-Phillips Duo, and the Caribbean folk band Les Gwan Jupons. Lisa has released her music on the Clean Feed, NoBusiness, Leo, NotTwo, Evander, Odd Shaped Case and Edgetone record labels, and has recorded as a sideperson for the Tzadik, Kadima and Porto Franco labels. She collaborates frequently on cross-disciplinary projects in sound installation, film/video, sculpture and public music/art.

As curator, she programs the annual JazzPOP concert seres at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, now in its 10th year; and a live cinema series, Mission Eye and Ear, at Artists' Television Access. She founded the Monday Makeout creative music series in the Mission District of San Francisco, and programs the Best Coast Jazz Composers series as a member of the artistic committee San Francisco's Center for New Music. In 2012 she started the "Festival-of-Us," a semi-annual festival celebrating Bay Area creative jazz and improvised music. Recent projects include an avant-folk string band, the Interlopers; Eartheaters, a trio with Brooklyn vocalist Fay Victor; and BODABODA, a cross-planetary collaboration with Venice reed player/composer Piero Bittolo Bon. In fall 2015 she premieres Glorious Ravage, a multi-media song cycle for large ensemble with commissioned films, inspired by the writings of Victorian lady adventurers.

Lisa has been artist-in-residence at Djerassi Resident Artists Program (2008, 2013), Headlands Center for the Arts (2006, 2015), the Banff International Jazz Workshop (2000), and the Painted Bride Arts Center (2000). She holds an MA in ethnomusicology from UC Berkeley (2003), and a BA in music from the University of Virginia (1997). She has performed at countless Bay Area venues including Intersection for the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, Yoshi's, the Jazzschool, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco; as well as the Earshot Jazz Festival, Seattle; the Montreal Jazz Festival and Victoriaville Festival de Musique Actuelle, Canada; the Monterey Jazz Festival, CA; Moers Festival, Germany; and Novara Jazz Festival, Italy.

Lisa has been awarded grants by the MAP Fund, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, American Composers Forum, the City of Oakland, Meet the Composer and Southern Exposure/the Andy Warhol Foundation. She performs as a sideperson in original jazz, improv and chamber ensembles led by estemmed bandleaders and West Coast musical visionaries, like Phillip Greenlief, Aaron Novik, Beth Custer, Randy McKean, Marco Eneidi, Vijay Anderson, Aaron Bennett, Myles Boisen, Steve Adams, Graham Connah, Jon Raskin, Cory Wright and Ross Hammond, and collaborates often with Darren Johnston, Vinny Golia, Katy Stephan, Aram Shelton, Kjell Nordeson, Murray Campbell, Jason Levis, Dina Maccabee, Noah Phillips, Rob Ewing, Kasey Knudsen, Myles Boisen, Sam Ospovat, John Hanes, and many many others."

-Lisa Mezzacappa Website (http://www.lisamezzacappa.com/bio.html)
11/29/2024

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"Vijay Anderson is a freelance drummer, bandleader, composer, and teacher who recently relocated to Brooklyn, New York. He has performed and recorded with Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalists Lynn Johnston and Vinny Golia; Bay Area composers/performers Ben Goldberg, Sheldon Brown, Graham Connah, Darren Johnston, Smith Dobson V, Lisa Mezzacappa, Aaron Bennett, Ava Mendoza, Hafez Modirzadeh and saxophonist/composer Marco Eneidi. He has worked extensively with bass player/composer Adam Lane as part of Lane's Full Throttle Orchestra, the Adam Lane Trio featuring Vinny Golia, and Adam Lane's Blue Spirit Band featuring Avram Fefer and Roy Campbell. He holds a MFA in music performance from Mills College and a BA in music performance from S.F. State.Anderson has composed and performed original scores for filmmakers Jeff Kao and Tim Hicks as well as for projects by the Facing East Dance Company. Other notable career highlights include performing with Connie Crothers, Virg Dzurinko, Daniel Carter, Roberto Miranda, Bobby Bradford, William Roper, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Darius Jones, Prasant Radhakrishnan, Paul Smoker, John Tchicai, Wadada Leo Smith, Herb Robertson, Steve Swell, Kenny Wessel, Ken Filiano, Garrison Fewell, Karl Berger's Stone Workshop, Steve Adams, Bishop Norman Williams, BJ Papa, the Bill Horvitz Expanded Band, Phillip Johnston, Joel Forrester, Mike Watt, Chuck Dukowski, and Slovenly Jr. (subbing for Rob Holzman).Anderson has performed at many venues in the Bay Area and beyond, including: Yoshi's, the Stone, Bruno's, Café Claude, the Comstock Saloon, Barbes, the Luggage Store, New Langton Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Bop Shop, the Hammer Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the De Young Museum, and Intersection for the Arts. He also has performed at many festivals including the Monterey Jazz Festival, the San Jose Jazz Festival, the Fillmore Jazz Festival, the San Francisco Alternative Music Festival, the North Beach Jazz Festival, Cimpfest 2011 in Villach, Austria, the Novara Jazz Festival 2012 in Novara, Italy, The 2013 VDU Jazz Connections Festival in Kaunas, Lithuania, The San Francisco Jazz Festival in 2014, and the Outsound Music Festival in 2016 and 2017.Anderson's recorded work can be found on Cadence Jazz Records, Clean Feed, CIMP, Pax Recordings, Edgetone, Evander Music, 3 Beads of Sweat, NotTwo, NineWinds, and NoBusiness Records. He additionally leads two of his own bands, the Vijay Anderson Quartet, and the Touch and Go Sextet. His first record under his own name, entitled "Hard Boiled Wonderland" was released in August 2010 on Nottwo Records. In 2012, Anderson received a travel grant from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation to take the Touch and Go Sextet to the Novara Jazz Festival 2012 in Novara, Italy. A recording of this concert was released in 2014 on the NineWinds Label.Recent work includes performing with Sheldon Brown's Blood of the Air, as well as various groups with saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh, including a quartet with bassist Mark Dresser and pianist/composer Diane Moser. Other recent projects include the Silverscreen Sextet involving luminaries from Los Angeles creative music scene as well the Adam Lane Trio featuring alto saxophonist Nick Lyons which toured the Russian Federation in 2017."-Vijay Anderson Website (http://vijayanderson.com/bio/)
11/29/2024

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