Otherworld Ensemble’s ongoing Finnish-jazzish journey

Otherworld Ensemble — Soul Bird (Edgetone, 2025)

Otherworld Ensemble presents Soul Bird: A concert at Down Home Music (10341 San Pablo Ave, El Cerrito) on Saturday, January 17, 2:00 p.m

Down Home Music, founded by the man who started Arhoolie Records, is a store associated with American and Mexican roots music — lots of blues and folk, for instance. In a show on the afternoon of Jan. 17, they’ll host roots of a different kind: the Otherworld Ensemble, led by Rent Romus and Heikki Koskinen, exploring their shared Finnish heritage.

They’ve traversed that path on previous Otherworld Ensemble albums including Journey to Manala and the Otherworld Cycle; under the auspices of the Life Blood Ensemble, they also recorded Itkuja Suite. With Soul Bird, they explore the myths built around the birds native to the Finnish region.

As with previous albums, Soul Bird is informed by the past several years of Romus’ research, including visits to Finland for study and performances. Specifically, it draws from his continuing work with traditional Finno-Ugric music, augmented by Nordic University documents and straight-up ornithology sources.

The band includes four sax/reeds players: Romus, Joshua Mashall, Joseph Noble, and Vinny Golia, augmented by Koskinen’s bright e-trumpet. Safa Shokrai holds down the bass, and Elihu Knowles — Romus’ frequent cohort these days and a member of the band Pateka — contributes drums and piano.

Flutes and recorders abound — the five horn players all contribute this way — as do percussive touches like frame drum (Knowles), creating placid, reverent spaces alongside the more open jazz passages. You’ve also got jawbone harp and flutes on the opener “Black Swan,” indicating ancient tradition with a touch of swing.

Listen to the phases of “Sotka (Creation of the World),” which moves from shamanic flute-chanting to swingy big band vibes to free-jazz bustle:

The jazz soloing is electric but carries overarching thoughtfulness, a patience paralleling nature’s slower, persisting rhythms. This holds even when they start burning it up; see Koskinen and Romus on “Vaakalintu (Bird’s Eye View)” (full track here):

Finally, I’ll add that I’m partial to the cool-handed sound of “Curious Hooded Crow (Utelias Varis)”:

It’s inspiring to see Romus continue this work. Most of us feel that tug of ancient roots, I think; I have my own in Japan. It’s enriching to explore the depth of another culture, especially when that culture is your own.

ADDENDUM:

A bit more about Down Home Music: Original owner Chris Strachwitz also founded the Arhoolie record label, which became a treasured archive of roots music — including jazz, even some Sonny Simmons records. (Of note: Manhattan Egos documents his late ’60s band, and Reincarnation is a 1991 live recording with trumpeter Barbara Donald, who was also Simmons’ wife for a time, and son Zarak Simmons.) Strachwitz died in 2023, and Down Home is now a nonprofit museum, gallery, and live music venue, as well as a store.

Not familiar with Arhoolie? Here’s a fun 2010 NY Times feature on Strachwitz, the label, and the store — including how Country Joe and the Fish helped pay for the building.

Find Soul Bird on Bandcamp.

SFEMF 2025: One blink

Angélica Negrón, SFEMF, November 2025 — *Angélica Negrón setting up*

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF) @ Gray Area, San Francisco:
Angélica Negrón
DULL
Leyya Mona Tawil
Friday, November 7, 2025

It happened during a blur of a week back in November, but I did manage to catch the opening night of SFEMF. This year, it was held in the spacious Gray Area, a Mission District movie house repurposed for all manner of multimedia events (including movies).

Angélica Negrón was the headliner, performing segments of Los (ostros) estatdos. Her instrumentation included plants — that is, chords or vocal samples triggered when Negrón gently touched plant leaves or fruit (a sound-generating technique built through a collaboration with Sophie Parker). The overall sound was comforting and well, florid — an enveloping atmosphere set against strongly colored backgrounds by Michael Anthony Carter.

Negrón is a headliner in her own right (her cello concerto will get premiered by Yo Yo Ma in May) but this was also a grand way to end SFEMF’s first night, a dose of warmth against the chilly night outside.

DULL preceded, a solo act with electric guitar, laptop electronics, and vocals. His piece was written as a duo, but his partner couldn’t make the international trip; her singing and text recitations came int he form of digital samples.

I recall the piece (no title given) as mostly heavy and foreboding. The guitar provided moments of brightness but at other times seemed to trigger darker digital sounds. The narration had to do with rain, a ceaseless tumult of rain, building up to a spoken finale: “An ark will not be built.”

They told us DULL’s real name, but I feel like I shouldn’t reveal it, in keeping with his rather mysterious bio.

Leyya Mona Tawil, SFEMF, November 2025 — *Leyya Mona Tawil*

The evening opened on a noisier note: Leyya Mona Tawil (aka Lime Rickey International) performing War Materials.

It was appropriately large and loud, a saturating rumble. Theatrical, too; the Lime Rickey International character is stranded here from the future, and her songs and folk dance come across to us as noise. Tawil’s equipment was splayed across the stage floor, shipwreck-style, and she performed in a formal dress, strutting from station to station, occasionally adding vocals through a handheld mic.

(See the Kunafa and Shay podcast for more about Lime Rickey International and how the character sprang from anguish about Syria and Palestine — “the idea of not being able to return home because your home is destroyed.”)

You can see and hear snippets of SFEMF’s first night in this video montage. Leyya Mona Tawil appears at around 1:32 and 3:59, and Angélica Negrón appears at around 0:52 and 4:26.

SFEMF celebrates its 25th anniversary this year and will do so back at The Lab, post-renovations. You can donate to help that renovation project, or donate to The Lab in general.

Angélica Negrón, SFEMF November 2025 — *Angélica Negrón in action*

Suzanne Ciani’s newer ‘new age’

Suzanne Ciani @ Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
Clarice Jensen, solo cello
Visual art by Emmett Feldman
November 21, 2025

In my head I associate Suzanne Ciani with new age music — spacey, slow stuff akin to ambient music but more sugary. Thing is, I didn’t listen to much of her work back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, so that impression came mostly through cultural osmosis.

“New age” is the box she was put into and the place where she made her name commercially. Especially here in Northern California, that melodic, calming stuff had reached the zeitgeist by 1990. That includes acoustic Windham Hill music — but also synth-driven “space music” that was slow, atmospheric, and lyrical in a sci-fi way.

So, I had typecast Ciani in that vein. Looking back, I wasn’t entirely wrong. Her commercial output included gentle piano albums that coincided with Windham Hill’s ascent, appealing to an audience that wasn’t necessarily into “jazz” nor “classical” but enjoyed this clean, refined music.

But Ciani always had a noisy side. She was an electronics music pioneer, working at the San Francisco Tape Music Center at Mills College, and she was an early advocate of the Buchla synthesizer. The record label Finders Keepers has released some of her ’70s Buchla performances, where she builds tuneful settings out of sounds that seemed other-dimensional back in the day.

(For more on her early work, see John Baccigaluppi’s thorough and personal interview on TapeOp.)

Going into this year, I’d become more aware of Ciani’s real resume. I’d heard her 2023 album with Jonathan Fitoussi, Golden Apples of the Sun, which features soothing electronic beats with dashes of tension and exploration. The Buchla produces techno-sounding pulses, waves, and glissandi, all very pleasant. You could call it “ambient,” but there’s more motion in it than that.

Today’s audiences are accustomed to noisy forms of ambient music and steely washes of computer-generated sound. Ciani seems to have found an audience at that intersection, one that likes the peaceful stuff and enjoys a bit of abstract adventure. She’d played at Grace Cathedral in 2024 as part of the Noise Pop festival (read the review on 48hills) and came back last month as part of her Out of the Ocean tour.

The hour-long performance had its sweet moments — one piano theme in particular that reprised at the end (I took it to be a sample of an old recording?) — but at times it was raucous and big. Individual ideas stuck around long enough to create “songs,” chapters of the overall story. I remember most of the music being closer to noise than new age. I especially liked a clackety percussion racket near the end, looping through the quadrophonic sound setup for the sensation of bouncing about the space.

I talk about the audience like they were all ambient/noise fans, but a lot of them possibly came for the light show. Emmett Feldman‘s visuals were precisely aligned with the cathedral alcove, giving Ciani a backdrop of grandeur and constant motion to match the energy of the moment, from simmering turbulence to speedy flybys. For Ciani’s opening — a gradual sunburst surge — Feldman used a recurring theme where a circle of light (or darkness) began as a central pinpoint and expanded outward to fill the alcove. I like to think that Ciani knew this was in Feldman’s bag of tricks, or vice versa, and they played to one another’s tendencies.

Clarice Jensen opened, performing on solo cello with loops and some electronic enhancements. The music was echoey and reverent, fit for a cathedral. It was tonal at its heart, a way to ease into the evening’s music, but it also had the heft to fill the space actively and stir the blood. Feldman’s imagery behind her was an abstract black-and-white, the shadows of ripples on a surface.

Ciani’s Out of the Ocean tour consisted of just a few cities, spread out over time. The last show happens to be tonight in Los Angeles (the timing of this post is just coincidence) and similarly takes place in a cathedral, with a light show, with Jensen opening again.

Queen Bee third wave

The Queen Bee Records Micro-Fest takes place Weds. November 5 and Thurs. November 6 at the Dresher Ensemble Studio (2201 Poplar St., Oakland).

Queen Bee Records is continuing with its plan to release 12 albums, all featuring Bay Area artists, across 12 months. This week, the ninth release comes out, and Queen Bee will celebrate with a Micro-Fest: two concerts featuring the latest three albums in the searies.

The 12 for 12 project began in February as a way to celebrate Queen Bee founder Lisa Mezzacappa’s 50th birthday year and her 25th anniversary of landing in the Bay Area.

It’s been earning notoriety too, which is part of the point. The scope of the project provides a chance to highlight many facets of the creative-music community that we have here. Jazz Times did a writeup in August, interviewing Mezzacappa about the project and the motivations behind it.

Here’s a glimpse at the three most recent 12/12 releases. All the artists will be part of the November 5-6 Micro-Fest.

* * * * *

Beth Schenck Quartet — Dahlia (Queen Bee, September 2025)

Beth Schenck’s composing is the focus for this melodic outing, where tracks like “Playground” present a gentle tone but pack some creative, twisty improvising. The group combines Schenck’s alto sax with Cory Wright’s tenor and bass clarinet up front. Matt Wrobel on guitar adds brisk solos and sublime comping, helping Mezzacappa (bass) and Jordan Glenn (drums) hold down the rhythm section.

The album occasionally drops into noisy territory too, with a couple of numbers favoring a more open-aired approach or, in the case of “Jedidiah,” a controlled blast. The album will be plenty satisfying to jazz fans but also shows off a creative spirit that transcends the category.

“Don’t Look Down” is a standout track with an uplifting tempo. Have a listen:

* * * * *

Oakland Reductionist Orchestra — west and east baying (Queen Bee, October 2025)

The 18-member Oakland Reductionist Orchestra is the house band of sorts for the West Oakland Sound Series, an ongoing calendar of shows curated by sfSound and Paul Dresher’s New Performance Traditions.

This album features two long-form improvisations of tense focus. Different sounds take the fore over time — woodwinds, vocals, percussion, strings — always serving a steady, hovering flow. The energy builds subtly, like a rising tide, until you suddenly realize this lower-case sound has become a bustle of activity.

The first track, “west baying,” is a live performance. But for “east of west baying,” the group recorded in the studio — and was then mixed by ensemble ringleader matt ingalls. It arguably turns the performance into a musique concrète piece, a form that ingalls has plenty of experience in (including presenting some of it at the annual SF Tape Music Festival). The results include an early surprise that couldn’t have been pulled off live.

This album will be the most challenging 12/12 installment for some listeners, but the rewards are there. And for those who are already fans of lower-case improv, it’s a no-brainer.

* * * * *

Nathan Clevenger Group — Astrolabe (Queen Bee, coming Nov. 7, 2025)

In some moments, it’s like a modern big band. At other times, it’s a chamber ensemble, improvising their way through slow-motion collisions. Composer and pianist Nathan Clevenger guides his ensemble patiently, letting stories unfold in diverse segments.

Astrolabe is a suite that Clevenger began presenting live in 2024, and it was created as a deliberate departure from his previous composing. Some elements remain compared with his records a decade ago — inventive melodic curves, touches of swingy jazz — but Astrolabe feels more expansive. Part of that comes from its wider spaces for untethered improvising.

Astrolabe is also more ambitious, with a group that includes five winds, three tuned-percussion players, and a cello. Most pieces play out like mini-suites of their own. Take “Light Bulb Chant,” which starts with an upbeat and irregular non-march; works through a series of conducted, improvised crashes; guides us through some dreamy jazz; and ends abruptly after an upbeat clockwork melody. It has a jazz air that transcends “jazz” — like much of the Queen Bee and 12/12 catalogue.

Back Pages #11: The distant dream of Song X

(The Back Pages series is explained here, where you’ll also find links to the other installments.)

My first serious jazz dabblings — the first time I truly paid attention — were Pat Metheny and Keith Jarrett, stemming from a stormy late night in a college dorm when a friend spun As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls and The Köln Concert. A mutual friend who was there was likewise hooked and began collecting Metheny albums — and so it came to be that one day in 1986, he brought over his latest find: a brand new copy of Song X.

We hated it. Oh god, how we hated it.

It’s not just that it wasn’t pretty, like Metheny’s American Garage. It was incomprehensible. My brain had trouble registering the music.

Keep in mind, I had no jazz knowledge and no conscious exposure to free jazz and didn’t even understand the principles behind “normal” jazz. My world revolved around prog rock, a place where you could count the time signature and hum the melody. Ornette’s music, erasing the boundaries of bar-counting and chords, was nowhere in my orbit.

As for the melodies — because Ornette certainly has them — I hadn’t even graduated to Theloneous Monk yet. Ornette’s melodies just didn’t process.

Coming back to Song X nearly 40 years later, I wonder what the problem was. It all sounds so normal, like an Ornette album that’s pop-ified with Metheny guitar solos.

Interestingly, I can’t find any track that matches my memory of that first Song X experience. It’s like I’m remembering music out of a dream. What I recall was something very choppy, a blizzard of frames spliced from infinite films. Shards flying too quickly to process. A churning turbulence built on logic I could not grasp.

It could be “Trigonometry.” Maybe I was disoriented by the dual drummers (Denardo Coleman and Jack DeJohnette) and their constant motion, that flickering hint of a groove.

I would love to tap into my past brain and hear the music I thought I was hearing. I’ll never know what it was.

Things changed, of course. I found the joy in Ornette’s compositions; Metheny’s own Rejoicing album helped. My ear adapted to free jazz’s rules of engagement. Not many years later, I would purchase Metheny’s Zero Tolerance for Silence in the hope that it was bizarre. See Pat Metheny’s Dark Side.

Carla Kihlstedt: 26 Little Deaths

Carla Kihlstedt — 26 Little Deaths (Cantaloupe, 2025)

Like the children’s book it’s based on, Carla Kihlstedt’s 26 Little Deaths is loads of fun with a dark-humor overhang. Unlike the book — Edward Gorey’s The Gashleycrumb Tinies — this 26-song suite peers behind into the lives of these 26 children. Their untimely and often nonsensical demises get fleshed out. They have backstories, sometimes amusing, sometimes poetic and emotionally weighty.

Such is the power of incomplete storytelling. Gorey’s book left plenty to the imagination. Kihlstedt fills those gaps with whimsy, grace, and a sense of wonder — and yet, she too leaves blank spaces for us to color in.

Schematically, 26 Little Deaths is a series of chamber miniatures led by Kihstedt on violin and vocals. They’re often performed with a full ensemble (the chamber symphony Present Music), and a few tracks have rich orchestrations by friends like Mark Orton, Kihlstedt’s bandmate in Tin Hat Trio.

The whimsical songs stand out most, but what makes the project special are the deep portraits like “M – Frission” and “V – Train of Thought.” Gorey’s character Maud isn’t simply “swept out to sea;” Kihlstedt sees her standing in water, serene in isolation. In a gorgeous orchestral swell, Maud becomes “the unwinding” and “just a way for the light to bounce back to the sky.” Victor isn’t just “squashed under a train;” he’s lost in the existential confusion that hits us all. “I don’t know what it means / I’m not the author of my dreams,” he says.

Even the instrumental tracks tell stories. “R – In Flagrante” uses chase-scene drama to illustrate Rhoda being “consumed by a fire.” It’s not a tragic accident; she’s an action hero! Winnie’s icy tomb is cinematically evoked in “W – Ice Cathedral,” and Xerxes being devoured by mice is depicted in the swelling unease of “X – Gnaw.”

And then there are the fun ones. “P – Knock, Knock!”, a hot-jazz take on how Prue got trampled flat in a brawl. (The title is a hint: Prue demanded to get in. Kihlstedt has loads of fun doing this one live.) Another special highlight is “S – Stupid Fort,” where the lyrics are a verbatim rant by Kihlstedt’s son Viggo Bossi (used with permission!).

(“T – Wooden Boxes” is special too. I’ll leave it to you to learn why.)

Special notice goes to “N – Ennui,” where Kilhstedt enlisted five arrangers: Jeremy Flower, Andy Jaffe, Ben Goldberg, Auran Ortiz, and Ari Chais. Neville, dying of ennui, keeps whining about how everything is the same, but the music behind him gets more exciting from one cycle to the next. There’s a lesson in there.

Present Music commissioned the suite, and Kihlstedt has performed it multiple times, both with the ensemble (at the Big Ears Festival last year, for example) and in smaller settings, the most extreme being a solo video concert filmed during the later days of Covid quarantine.

My live experience with the suite was at San Francisco Performances’ PIVOT festival, where Kihlstedt performed with pianist Sarah Cahill, the Del Sol Quartet, and members of Sandbox Percussion. It was tremendous, and “Z – Love Song for Dolly” really gave me the feels. I don’t know why. That’s what the best stories do; they bump emotions loose and leave us wondering.

Find it on Bandcamp.

Aaron Bennett, inside and out

Aaron Bennett’s trio for three performs at the IBeam Brooklyn on Sunday, July 27.

Aaron Bennett — trio for three (self-released, 2025)

Equal parts swing and skronk, this sax-bass-drums album combines Monk tunes with originals and one group improvisation. There’s a sense of rapport and easy flow, both in challenging but swingy passages (“Adam’s Rib” is a mix of both) and in boundary-less free improvising, as on the restrained “Quiet Tango.”

None of this is surprising to me. Aaron Bennett (sax), Adam Lane (bass), and Vijay Anderson (drums) all have footholds in the Bay Area. I’ve seen them many times in different settings, including Bennett and Anderson as part of the Lisa Mezzacappa Quartet and Go-Go Fightmaster (which shared the same band personnel but with different goals).

Trio for three is a celebration of Monk and that late bebop era, and it’s a chance for these players to exercise their “inside” chops. But they also apply their skills in freer jazz styles and open improvisation, blending all these influences organically. You hear it quickly in the Monk tune “Raise Four” which swings but still hits those outside notes: chirps and clips from Bennett’s sax.

Among the originals, “Ocean” showcases Lane’s silky melodicism on bass and Anderson’s crisp drumming. And “Adam’s Rib” sets up some strong riffage and an exciting all-trio solo. Both start placidly but heat up in good time.

Trio for three celebrates the multiple facets that exist in so many musicians. It’s faithful to Monk without being phoned in, and it serves forward progression in jazz without losing accessibility.

They’ll be performing at the IBeam Brooklyn on July 27. Back home, Bennett has a Bay Area version of the band with Dan Seamans on bass and Smith Dobson Jr. on drums. They have a separate album out on Bandcamp, and you can see them in action in this video posted earlier this year, below. And if you happen to catch this post in time, you can also see Bennett perform as part of the Lisa Mezzacappa Six(ish) at The Stone.

Queen Bee on stage: Ivy Room and The Stone

Lisa Mezzacappa‘s Queen Bee Records set an audacious goal for 2025: releasing one album per month for 12 months. It’s nearly the halfway point (the releases started in February, so the final installment comes January 2026), and Mezzacappa has a busy month of shows to promote the project.

Thursday, July 10: A second Queen Bee microfest at the Ivy Room in Albany, following up a similar (and joyous!) show in April. This features disks number 4 through 6 in the 12/12 series, from artists Bristle; the Adams/Mezzacappa/Levis trio; and Sifter. Details and relevant videos are in my previous 12/12 writeup.
Saturday, July 12: duo B. is performing at a house concert in Berkeley, part of the ongoing Spruce Street Concerts series. Consisting of Mezzacappa (bass) and Jason Levis (drums), duo B. released the first of Queen Bee’s 12/12 albums, Luminous Axis.
July 23-26: A residency at The Stone, John Zorn’s legendary New York music venue, with Mezzacappa leading varying sets of all-Bay Area musicians. That includes the Cosmicomics band, playing pieces inspired by Italo Calvino.

The week at The Stone has extra significance given the 12/12 mission. The project celebrates Mezzacappa’s 50th birthday and 25th year in the Bay Area, but it’s also a megaphone for the local creative music community. It’s a concise yet grandiose talking point to inform other artistic hubs about the talent and spirit that bloom out here, with Mezzacappa as one of the key figures helping foster that spirit. It’s all detailed in Andrew Gilbert’s profile for Mission Local:

Lisa Mezzacappa brings a rising tide of improvised music to the Bay Area

Cruel irony: I can’t attend any of the July shows, because I’ll be in New York, of all places, on July 10 and 12 and back home the Bay Area long before the 23rd.

I did attend Microfest #1 back in April, though, which was at Thee Stork Club in Oakland. Michael Zelner has posted video excerpts of the three sets: duo B. (with guitarist Liberty Ellman), the Green Mitchell Trio, and Jordan Glenn’s BEAK. The latter has a visual, theatrical aspect that makes for an especially fun live experience — and it grooves, too.

Moe Staiano: Music for Eight Guitars

Moe Staiano premiered his Music for Eight Guitars (The Parting Gift) as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival early in May. It’s an insistent and pounding piece, and we got to be surrounded by it in the performance space at Monkey Brains, an independent internet service provider working out of SF’s Mission District.

Monkey Brains does have a stage, where two of the guitarists stood along with Moe, who conducted. But the rest of the musicians sat around the periphery, spaced apart to surround the audience: six guitars, electric bass, a drum kit, and Jordan Glenn on percussion (small, ringing, metallic drums — they have a name that I can’t recall).

Last year, Staiano released Away Towards the Light, another long-form piece for many guitars. Eight Guitars used a lot of the same tactics: repeated phrases in minimalist patterns, played by subgroups of guitars in unison and often creating hocketing effects — beats alternating back and forth between two subgroups separated by physical space. That’s why the physical spread of instruments is meaningful: We received blocks of sound from different directions, a more-than-stereo mix adding up to a single purpose.

Staiano’s pulsing currents of sound share genealogy with minimalism or trance — but louder. It’s “a scream in space,” to borrow a phrase from Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya, whose music has a similar quality, but slower.

Staiano’s mad, slashing conducting added to the show’s visual element, especially late in the piece as the momentum crested. Suki O’Kane stood in the center of the room as a relay, giving the scattered players another line of sight to a conductor. They amusingly referred to her role as “semi-conductor.”

Away Towards the Light is more of a chamber piece, and even at high volume, it comes across on record as polished and serious. Eight Guitars felt more visceral, especially in a small setting with LIVE sound blasting from all corners. Several dozen people packed the sold-out room, and even those who didn’t seem to know what to expect were energetically head-bobbing along, happy to ride the raging current.

Somewhere back at home, Staiano has a composition for 48 guitars that was written some time ago but never performed. It’s too logistically difficult. (Problem No. 1: getting enough space to position 48 people with guitars and amplifiers.) Meanwhile, a revival of his earliest big composition, Piece No. 1: Death of a Piano, is scheduled for July 5 at First Church of the Buzzard (Oakland). It should be a good dose of noise, mischief, and destruction.

12 for 12: Queen Bee’s year-long record release project

The Queen Bee label showcase — with Jordan Glenn’s BEAK; Cory Wright’s Green Mitchell Trio; duo B. vs. Liberty Ellman; and Wobbly — happens at Thee Stork Club (Oakland) on Thursday, April 3.

Lisa Mezzacappa is releasing 12 albums in 12 months on her Queen Bee record label, with the first two having arrived in February and March. It’s a well-deserved celebration of Mezzacappa’s 50th birthday and her 25th year in California, but it’s also a bit of fun audacity — a stunt that can help draw attention to the label and, consequently, to the Bay Area music scene. The duration helps, in that the idea will be out there for 12 months. If listener halfway across the country hears about this in July or September, “12 for 12” goal will still be a valid talking point.

The launch party happens on Thursday, April 3, when the label will take over Thee Stork Club for Queen Bee Microfest #1. Playing that night will be duo B. and Cory Wright’s Green Mitchell Trio — subjects of the February/March “12 for 12” releases — and Jordan Glenn’s BEAK, who I’m guessing are the April artist. Wobbly will be doing micro-sets, probably between the acts.

Here’s the official blurb:

“A night of freewheeling improvised music and creative jazz from some of the scene’s most adventurous and exciting bands. Celebrating the first three recordings on Berkeley’s Queen Bee Records in a series of 12 releases coming this year.”

A different kind of microfest will take place in New York, when Mezzacappa does a July 23-26 residency at The Stone, the John Zorn-led hub for creative music. She’ll present four nights of all-Bay Area artists, including the Cosmicomics band that I’ve written about twice (once on record, once live).

The Queen Bee label has existed for years, but the 12 for 12 project calls for new frills. There’s a new hexagon logo (see above), and — I love this — a minimalist blank hexagon as a common design theme for the albums.

Here’s a summary of the first two:

duo B. — Luminous Axis (February 2025) — duo B is Jason Levis on drums and Mezzacappa on bass, and I love that the first track on their first album was called “So It’s Just the Two of You.” Luminous Axis is based on a Wadada Leo Smith score that duo B. studied deeply, to the point where it was the foundation of a four-hour performance at Oakland’s Garden of Memory summer solstice event. This album is a shorter exploration full of complex ideas and deft improvisation. Bandcamp link.

Green Mitchell Trio — Nature Channel (March 2025) — Cory Wright leads this reeds-bass-drum trio, covering ground from swingy jazz compositions to brainy compositions that combine structure with freedom. Bandcamp link.

Queen Bee announced its May through July releases as well:

Bristle — Archimera (May 16) — Randy McKean’s quartet led by saxes and a violin. Bouncy, playful chamber-jazz pieces with stretches of studious improvising. The video below shows them performing “Hick” in 2014.

Adams / Mezzacappa / Levis — never dream the days (June 6) — The duo B Experimental Band, Mezzacappa and Levis’s large ensemble, continued to convene online during 2020’s pandemic lockdown. One offshoot of that group was the trio of saxophonist Steve Adams with Mezzacappa and Levis, with results so strong that they decided to record some improvisations in 2022.

Sifter — Flake/Fracture (July 11) — Trombonist Rob Ewing’s quartet which “thrives on deep improvisation, groove, and textural exploration, drawing from a wide spectrum of musical influences.” All four members compose, and the band’s sound was nourished by years of regular gigs at Woods Bar & Brewery in Oakland.

Here’s Sifter performing at Bird & Beckett Books in San Francisco: