John Blum / Michael Foster / Brandon Lopez Trio, The Ghost (Michael Foster, John Moran, Joey Sullivan) & John Blum solo

John Blum/Michael Foster/ Brandon Lopez Trio:

John Blum is a Jazz Pianist/Composer born in New York City who has been performing internationally for over 25 years.  He is known as a musician who aims for the very personal, conveying the concepts of honesty and integrity in his playing.  His Piano technique is something of a Jazz Hybrid of Cecil Taylor and McCoy Tyner, decidedly percussive but with relentlessly fast right-hand linear structure. Blum plays with such forcefulness and rapidity that he sounds like Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano rolls, interpreted via human hands, freed up into a liquid state. He is an underground legend of the downtown music scene in New York, known for his explosive high voltage pianism, and as a musician who aims for the very personal. His antecedents are apparent: Boogie-Woogie, Harlem Stride, Be-Bop and Free Jazz, but John has absorbed all of these styles to find a unique voice that defies classification. 

He has played with many Jazz luminaries, including Sunny Murray, Hamid Drake, Sirone, Charles Gayle, Marco Eneidi, Sabir Mateen, Daniel Carter, Denis Charles, Sonny Simmons, William Parker, Han Bennink, and Clarinetist Tony Scott. 

Michael Foster is a saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, curator, and improviser based in New York City dealing with various forms of "weird music". His work seeks to bridge the gaps between noise, improvisation, the jazz tradition, and queer theoretical practices. He often prepares his saxophone with an array of objects such as balloons, drum heads, amplification, etc as a method of queering the instrument's musical roles and history.He works in duos with Ben Bennett, Leila Bordreuil, Lydia Lunch, and Richard Kamerman as The New York Review of Cocksucking. He has worked with William Parker, Weasel Walter, Marina Rosenfeld, Nate Wooley, Sarah Hennies, and many others. He has performed at various venues across North America and Europe, such as BimHuis, Roulette, Issue Project Room, The Stone, The Kitchen, Pioneer Works and many more. In addition to his work as a performer, he co-founded "Queer Trash", a curatorial platform for LGBTQIA+ artists engaged in experimental performance practices. "Queer Trash" was selected as the 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow at Issue Project Room.

Brandon López is a New York-based composer and bassist working at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise and new music. His music has been praised as “brutal” (Chicago Reader) and “relentless” (The New York Times). From the New York Philharmonic's David Geffen Hall to the DIY basements of Brooklyn, Lopez has worked beside many luminaries of jazz, classical, poetry, and experimental music. Lopez was awarded the 2018 Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room and 2018 Van Lier Fellow at Roulette Intermedium and 2020 Jerome Residency Roulette. He was a featured soloist with the New York Philharmonic in Ashley Fure’s “Filament” and a number of works with John Zorn, including Zorn's 35th anniversary of “Cobra.” He’s had the pleasure of working regularly with Nate Wooley, William Parker, Paul Lytton, Jooklo Duo, Leila Bordreuil, Mette Rasmussen, Justice Yeldham, Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Evans, Ingrid Laubrock, Tom Rainey, Gerald Cleaver, Man Forever, Joe Morris and many others. He currently leads his own ensemble, The Mess with Chris Corsano and Sam Yulsman, and works extensively as a soloist.

The Ghost:

The Ghost was formed as both a tribute to Michael Foster's disparate influences in free jazz, harsh noise, and the gay underground community, and as a middle finger to the suffocating heteronormative establishment of improvised music. 

Joey Sullivan and John Moran have been active in the Philadelphia scene for years. 

Moran has been a part of Maya Keren’s trio with Julian Miltenberger, Micah Graves’ group, as well as playing in bands like Bark Culture, EAT, Guitars and Drums, and Ceiba, both of the latter alongside Joey Sullivan. 

Sullivan is active in both setting up some very successful free music showings as well as playing with an array of east coast improvisers. Playing drums in out music groups like Bark Culture & Violet Salon III with James McKain as well as playing in active alt-folk groups like Florry.

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