Joe McPhee/James Ilgenfritz; Sean Meehan/Zoots Houston; Catherine Sikora/David Menestres
Notice Recordings presents
Joe McPhee – saxophones
James Ilgenfritz – double bass
Sean Meehan – percussion
Zoots Houston – pedal steel
Catherine Sikora – saxophones
David Menestres – double bass
Living legend Joe McPhee with double bassist James Ilgenfritz of Infrequent Seams, first meeting of Sean Meehan and Zoots Houston—two fascinating players, and David Menestres and Catherine Sikora, catching them on tour. David will also be on an imminent Notice release as part of the Tamarisk trio.
JOE MCPHEE: A multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, conceptualist and theoretician. He is currently the member of Trio X, Survival Unit III and has collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Brotzmann, Evan Parker, Raymond Boni, The Thing, Trespass Trio, and Universal Indians among many others. With a career spanning nearly 50 years and over 100 recordings, he continues to tour internationally, forge new connections and reach for music’s outer limits.
Since his emergence on the creative jazz and new music scene in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Joe McPhee has been a deeply emotional composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a thoughtful conceptualist and theoretician.
McPhee’s first recordings as leader appeared on the CjR label, founded in 1969 by painter Craig Johnson . These include Underground Railroad by the Joe McPhee Quartet in 1969, Nation Time by Joe McPhee in 1970, and Trinity by Joe McPhee, Harold E. Smith and Mike Kull in 1971.
JAMES ILGENFRITZ: Composer and bassist James Ilgenfritz is recognized in the New Yorker for his “characteristic magnanimity” and his “invaluable contributions to New York’s new-music community.” His 2019 album You Scream A Rapid Language collects recent chamber works, and features Pauline Kim Harris, Conrad Harris, William Winant, Thomas Buckner, Kathleen Supové, Margaret Lancaster, and Joseph Kubera, and was noted in The Wire for its “glint of mischief” and ability to “foreground the performative and gestural elements of music making.”
James presented residencies at John Zorn’s The Stone in 2015 and 2017. In 2019 James performed in Anthony Braxton’s Composer Portrait concert at Columbia University’s Miller Theater (with Either/Or and the JACK Quartet), and premiered his second opera, I Looked At The Eclipse. Recent projects include his trio Hypercolor (released on John Zorn’s record label Tzadik with Lukas Ligeti & Eyal Maoz) and his recent solo CD Origami Cosmos (featuring works by Annie Gosfield, Miya Masaoka, Elliott Sharp, & JG Thirlwell). In June 2018 James presented his second residency at John Zorn’s venue The Stone, with premieres for the Momenta Quartet, flutist Margaret Lancaster, The New Thread Saxophone Quartet, and the Kathleen Supové/James Moore/Jennifer Choi trio, as well as solo bass works by John King, Anthony Donofrio, and Lucie Vitkova.
James has performed throughout the US, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Poland, and Switzerland. James’s notable performances include work with composer/improvisers Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, Rufus Reid, Anthony Braxton, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, and many others. James has received grants from New Music USA and American Composers Forum. He holds degrees from University of Michigan and University of California San Diego. James began New York’s first Suzuki Bass program at Brooklyn Conservatory of Music in 2011, and continued there until 2019, when he left to pursue a PhD in music composition at University of California Irvine. James splits his time between Brooklyn, NY and southern California.
SEAN MEEHAN: Sean Meehan is a drummer who most notably plays a pared-down kit often consisting of a single snare drum and cymbal, creating sounds that range from the subtle friction of a fork rubbing against a drum to tones that seem electronically-generated. These complex, sometimes subtle sonorities require a great deal of concentration for the performer and listener, foregrounding the act of listening just as much as the production of sound, and bringing the audience’s attention to both spatial acoustics and social interactions within a space.
Meehan traces much of his development as a musician to the time he spent as a teen in the public library, in particular reading Downbeat Magazine’s Blindfold Tests, for which magazine staff would play recordings for jazz musicians without identifying the artists. The guest musician would comment and guess whom they were hearing. From this he understood the importance of having a unique sound and language. How to obtain that goal was informed by other books Meehan selected for the provocative titles running down their spines: As Serious As Your Life: Black Music And The Free-Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977, by Valerie Wilmer helped him understand that the way to one’s own music was for it to be a reflection of one’s particular social context, politics, and inner being; and from a distant shelf, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music by Hermann von Helmholtz provided a lifetime of information and inspiration.
ZOOTS HOUSTON: An improviser of various sorts. He works primarily with misuse and perversion of objects and systems. Virtuosity, volatility, futility, and capability are thought of. Zoots currently lives, works, and plays in Kingston, NY.
CATHERINE SIKORA: Tenor and soprano saxophonist, improviser and composer Catherine Sikora was first electrified by the sound of air vibrating in a metal tube when, as a child, she heard the wind playing tones and overtones in a metal gate. She has devoted her life to researching the magic of that sound with her saxophones, particularly in her solo work, which forms the main backbone of her creative output.
Catherine’s first solo album ‘Jersey’ was released on Relative Pitch Records in July 2016. She followed this with ‘Warrior‘, an all-soprano saxophone solo recording in 2019. Her next solo tenor recording, ‘Sanctuary‘, recorded live in Paris in summer of 2020, was released in fall 2020.
In addition to her solo work, Sikora works frequently in duo and larger settings, with Eric Mingus, Brian Chase, Ursel Schlicht, Ethan Winogrand, Ross Hammond, Christopher Culpo and Matteo Liberatore. She is proud to be one third of the joyful rowdiness that is Eris 136199.
Sikora is active as an educator and writes extensively on the subject of practice.
DAVID MENESTRES: A bassist, composer, and writer currently living in North Carolina. David is the founder/leader of the Polyorchard ensemble (“a vital and wonderfully vexing force of the area’s sonic fringes”), recent trio Tamarisk with Andrew Weathers and Christina Carter from Charalambides. He hosts a radio show airing Sunday nights on taintradio.org.
