Jason Roebke Quartet

saturday, september 28

TIME: 2:00pm-3:00pm

VENUE: logan center performance penthouse. 915 east 60th st.

Jason Roebke

The diversity of Jason Roebke’s musical associations make him one of the most sought-after bassists, composers, and educators in Chicago and beyond. He composes music that is rooted in jazz, takes inspiration from experimental music, noise, and improvisation, and is extreme in its pairing of silence and explosive gestures. Solo performance and a duo with dancer Ayako Kato are also at the forefront of his creative activities. As a double bassist, Roebke’s playing is intensely physical, audacious, and sparse. He studied privately with saxophonist and composer Roscoe Mitchell as well as with legendary double bass pedagogue Stuart Sankey. In 2009, he was awarded the Fellowship in Music Composition from the Illinois Arts Council. He tours widely in the U.S. and Europe.

Edward L. Wilkerson, Jr. is an internationally recognized American jazz composer, arranger, musician, and educator based in Chicago. As founder and director of the cutting-edge octet 8 Bold Souls and the 25-member performance ensemble Shadow Vignettes, Wilkerson has toured festivals and concert halls throughout the U.S., Europe, Japan, and the Middle East. As one of the great saxophone and clarinet players on the Chicago scene from the 1980s and into the new millennium, Wilkerson may be best known as a composer and bandleader. He has also been a major presence in Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), teaching composition at the organization’s music school and serving for a time as AACM president.

Marcus Evans is a drummer and composer who has worked with many of Chicago’s top jazz musicians, including Greg Ward, Nicole Mitchell, Isaiah Collier, and David Boykin.

Pianist Mabel Kwan is a founding member of Ensemble Dal Niente. She tours with improvised music group Restroy, synthesizer duo Mega Laverne and Shirley, and electronic/instrumental trio Uluuul. She is a 2018 High Concept Labs Artist and 2017 3Arts Awardee and is recognized for her work in classical, improvised, and experimental music. Her self-produced work is a meditation on sound, contradictions, and our perceptions of what is familiar or strange. Her 2016 debut solo album, one poetic switch, features works written for her on piano and clavichord. She has also released a solo clavichord album (2016) in collaboration with composer Danny Clay and artist Andrew Barco, and the premiere recording of the complete Trois Hommages by Georg Friedrich Haas (2018), among others.

The musicians:

Jason Roebke – bass, cassette
Edward Wilkerson Jr. – saxophone, clarinet, cassette
Mabel Kwan – piano, cassette
Marcus Evans – drums, cassette