Colorado nonprofit organization Creative Music Works (CMW) announces its Fall 2025 lineup, featuring Fred Frith and Janet Feder, Ches Smith’s Clone Row and Brìghde Chaimbeul. CMW connects artists to audiences, while working to inspire, educate, and challenge listeners and to cultivate the role of jazz, improvisation, and experimental music in today’s culture.

The season opens on September 16 with exploratory guitarists/composers Fred Frith and Janet Feder, who have performed together several times and also appear on their 2006 album, Ironic Universe. Frith, who learned how to compose in rock bands, starting with Henry Cow in 1968, says, “I embrace the idea of the “work” as an unfinished and constantly mutating entity. Collaboration, improvisation, sculpting sound in the studio, and treating composition as an open-ended process remain central to how I make music.”

A native of Boulder, Colorado, Feder is most widely known for pioneering composition for prepared guitar. She has been featured on numerous recordings, radio programs, and film scores.

Drummer/composer Ches Smith’s most recent effort Clone Row debuts an adventurous new quartet featuring guitarists Mary Halvorson and Liberty Ellman and bassist Nick Dunston. Smith finds endless possibilities in this instrumentation, weaving together varied threads from his divergent earlier projects in ways that sound not quite like any of them.

Four renowned composer-improvisers tangle with Smith’s newest compositions. Two highly individualistic guitarists swirl, echo and double-take, squaring off with a bass and drums team that anchors and unhinges through doubling sounds -- drum machines and acoustic drums, low-end analog synth and acoustic bass, digital samples and repeated fragments performed in real time. In a dance of coherence and chaos, the four musicians plunge headlong into the feedback loop of composition and improvisation armed with chemistry created by their mutual appreciation and enduring friendships.

Ghost Canyon and CMW present Brìghde Chaimbeul, a leading purveyor of Celtic experimentalism and a master of the Scottish smallpipes; a bellows-blown, mellower cousin to the famous Highland bagpipes. A native Gaelic speaker, Chaimbeul roots her music in her language and culture. She rose to prominence as a prodigy of traditional music, but has since begun a journey to take the smallpipes into unchartered territory. She has devised a unique way or arranging for pipe music that emphasizes the rich textural drones of the instrument; the constancy of sound that creates a trance-like atmosphere, played with enticing virtuosic liquidity.

Chaimbeul draws inspiration from the world of interconnected piping traditions, and her most recent album brings in influence from ambient, avant-garde and electronic music. Her mesmerizing musicianship has won her many awards and media recognition, including BBC Young Folk Award, BBC Horizon Award, SAY Award nomination and a wide array of collaborators include Caroline Polachek, Colin Stetson, Gruff Rhys, Radie Peat.