Biography
The Empty Cage Quartet has consistently been praised as one of the most powerful and original new jazz groups to emerge from the American West Coast. For nearly six years the group has explored imaginative new ways to integrate a diverse mix of musical influences ranging from shuffle swing to free jazz blowouts, minimalist percussion loops to complex modernist gestures, robotic grooves, odd-meter marches, heavy rock, and nearly everything in between. Performances of this music involve an elaborate system of on-stage cues to navigate the flow of improvisation in, around, and out of modular compositional structures designed to cycle, overlap, combine and recombine. The result is a continually evolving, multidimensional approach to jazz and new music performance, improvisational acuity, and compositional craft that Amazing Sounds Magazine has likened to an "urban folk music of the future."
The Empty Cage Quartet has toured extensively in the Western United States and in Canada and Europe, and they have received support from the American Composers Forum, the International Society for Improvised Music (ISIM), and Chamber Music America’s French-American Jazz Exchange. To date they have released six CD recordings that have been featured on jazz radio stations around the world and reviewed favorably in publications including Signal to Noise, The Wire, All About Jazz, Cadence Magazine, Jazz Hot, Paris Transatlantic Magazine, LA Weekly, Tucson Weekly, and Stride Magazine. Stratostrophic, their most recent album, is out now on the Clean Feed label, and in September they will make their New York City debut with a concert at the Living Theatre co-sponsored by Clean Feed Festival III and the Sixth Annual Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT).
Videos are available at http://www.youtube.com/EmptyCageQuartet
Instrumentation
Jason Mears - alto saxophone, clarinet, flutes
Kris Tiner - trumpet, flugelhorn
Ivan Johnson - double bass
Paul Kikuchi - drums, percussion, electronics
Discography
Stratostrophic (Clean Feed) 2008
Hello the Damage! (pfMENTUM 2CD) 2006
Day of the Race (Nine Winds) 2005
Making Room for Spaces (Nine Winds) 2004
Music from the 2003 West Coast Tour (little green records) 2003
Who Knows the Wicker Man? (little green records) 2003
Links
| http://www.emptycagequartet.com |