Jill Burton (born 1952) is an American improviser, extended vocalist, dancer, performance artist and energy worker. [1] Noted as one of the great foundation improvisors of America, [2] she is also known for incorporating spiritual healing with improvised performance. [3] Active in the American improv scene since the early 1970s, she has lived and worked all over the country, including a ten-year stint in the 1980s as part of the downtown East Village experimental arts community, and six years in Sitka, Alaska, where she worked with Tlingit storytellers providing musical accompaniment for their healing stories. [4] Burton is unusual for a musician in that her work is ephemeral, in-the-moment, and therefore recordings of her work are rare. [5] She has collaborated with many notable experimental musicians and dancers, including LaDonna Smith, [6] Davey Williams, [7] Jane Scarpantoni, [8] Judy Dunaway, [9] David First, Rain Worthington, [10] Gino Robair, [11] Jack Wright, and Scott Walton.[ citation needed ]
Dorothy Faye Dunaway is an American actress. She is the recipient of many accolades, including an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and a BAFTA Award. In 2011, the government of France made her an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Miya Masaoka is an American composer, musician, and sound artist active in the field of contemporary classical music and experimental music. Her work encompasses contemporary classical composition, improvisation, electroacoustic music, inter-disciplinary sound art, sound installation, traditional Japanese instruments, and performance art. She is based in New York City.
David Rosenboom is a composer, performer, interdisciplinary artist, author, and educator known for his work in American experimental music.
Judy Reyes is an American actress, model and producer, best known for her roles as Carla Espinosa on the NBC/ABC medical comedy series Scrubs (2001–2009), as Zoila Diaz in the Lifetime comedy-drama Devious Maids (2013–2016), and as Annalise "Quiet Ann" Zayas in the TNT crime comedy-drama Claws (2017—2022). Reyes also appeared in films All Together Now (2020), Smile (2022), and Birth/Rebirth (2023), for which she received Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Performance nomination.
Royal Wedding is a 1951 American musical comedy film directed by Stanley Donen, and starring Fred Astaire and Jane Powell, with music by Burton Lane and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. Set in 1947 London at the time of the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten, the film follows an American brother-sister song and dance duo who, while performing, each fall in love — he, with a female dancer, and she, with an impoverished but well-connected nobleman. The film marked Donen's second directorial feature. It was released as Wedding Bells in the United Kingdom.
Rachel Rosenthal was a French-born interdisciplinary and performance artist, teacher, actress, and animal rights activist based in Los Angeles.
The FLUX Quartet is an American string quartet dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music. It was founded in 1998 and is based in New York City. The group is renowned for its performances of Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 2, which lasts for more than six hours. It has performed to rave reviews in venues of all sorts, from Carnegie's Zankel Hall and Kennedy Center, to influential art institutions such as EMPAC, The Kitchen, and the Walker Art Center, to international music festivals in Australia, Europe, and the Americas. It has also premiered new works on numerous experimental series, including Roulette, Bowerbird, and the Music Gallery. FLUX's radio credits include NPR's All Things Considered, WNYC's New Sounds and Soundcheck, and WFMU's Stochastic Hit Parade. The group's discography includes recordings on the Cantaloupe, Innova, Tzadik, and Cold Blue Music labels, in addition to two critically acclaimed releases on Mode Records that encompass the full catalogue of string quartet works by Morton Feldman.
Judy Dunaway is a conceptual sound artist, avant-garde composer, free improvisor and creator of sound installations who is primarily known for her sound works for latex balloons. Since 1990 she has created over thirty works for balloons as sound conduits and has also made this her main instrument for improvisation.
Gino Robair is an American composer, improvisor, drummer, percussionist, and magazine editor. In his own music work, he plays prepared/modified percussion, analog synthesizer, ebow and prepared piano, theremin, and bowed objects. Robair resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.
LaDonna Smith is an American avant garde musician from Alabama. She is a violinist, violist, and pianist. Since 1974 she has been performing free improvisational music with musicians such as Davey Williams, Leland Davis, Michael Evans, Gunther Christmann, Anne Lebaron, Derek Bailey, Eugene Chadbourne, Misha Feigin, Michael Evans, David Sait, Jack Wright, John Russell, Sergey Letov, Toshi Makihara, Andrew Dewar and many other of the world's major improvisers. As a performer, she has toured the US, Canada, Europe, including Russia and Siberia, Korea, India, China and Japan. Her music is documented on dozens of CD and LP recordings, including Say Daybew Records - of Fred Lane & the Debonaires. She produced concerts and festivals in Alabama and the Southeast, including the Birmingham Improv Festival and the improvisorfestival. She serves on the Board of Directors of I.S.I.M., the International Society of Improvised Music. In 1976, LaDonna Smith co-founded TransMuseq Records with Davey Williams. In 1980, The Improvisor magazine began as an extension of I.N.: The Improvisor's Network, a grass-roots organization in New York City that attempted to connect improvising musicians across the U.S. LaDonna is editor-in-chief and publisher of The improvisor. She is a member of the Fresh-Dirt collective.
The Club Foot Orchestra is a musical ensemble known for their silent film scores. Their influences include Eastern European folk music, impressionism, and jazz fusion; The New Yorker described their style as "music that bubbles up from the intersection of aesthetics and the id."
Nicole Mitchell is an American jazz flautist and composer who teaches jazz at the University of Virginia. She is a former chairwoman of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).
"Russian Roulette" is a song recorded by Barbadian singer Rihanna for her fourth studio album, Rated R (2009). It premiered on radio stations worldwide on October 20, 2009, and was released as the album's lead single on October 26 by Def Jam Recordings. Written and produced by Ne-Yo and Chuck Harmony, "Russian Roulette" is a pop and R&B ballad that contains dark, morbid, and tense atmospheric elements in its composition. Lyrically, the single is about an abusive romantic relationship that ended abruptly. Music critics noted the lyrical theme to be a response to the domestic violence case between Rihanna and her former boyfriend, singer Chris Brown.
The Bay Area Improv Scene is a commonly used name for a loose association of musicians and composers centered in the San Francisco Bay Area who create a style of music that evolved largely from avant-garde jazz and modern classical music, with influences from other areas such as electronic art music, free improvisation, and musique concrète. Other names of this scene tend to use phrases such as "Creative Music" to try to incorporate a wider focus than just the improvisational approach.
Thollem McDonas is an American pianist, improviser, composer, singer-songwriter, touring performer, musical educator, and social critic. His musical compositions and performances have ranged from classical, and free jazz, to experimental and punk rock. He has toured North America and Europe since 2006, performing solo works and collaborating with an array of musicians, dancers, dance companies and filmmakers.
Maria Chavez is an improviser, curator and sound artist born 1980 in Lima, Peru. Her family moved to Texas when she was two years old. The following year doctors found and released liquid in her ears alleviating what had been a serious impediment to her speech and hearing. By age 16 she began working with sound and turntables. Her sound installations, visual objects and live turntable performances focus on the values of the accident and its unique, complicated possibilities with sound emitting machinery like the turntable. Influenced by improvisation in contemporary art, her work extends outside of the sound world to straddle varied disciplines of interest. The sound installations and live turntable performances of Maria Chavez focus on the paradox of time and the present moment, with many influences stemming from improvisation in contemporary art.
Roulette Intermedium is a performing arts and new music venue located in Brooklyn, New York City. Founded in 1978, it has been located in the neighborhoods of Tribeca and SoHo in Manhattan, and now resides in a renovated theater in downtown Brooklyn. Roulette is a nonprofit organization focusing on fostering experimental dance, new music, and performance.
Jessica Pavone is a New York-based violinist, violist and experimental composer. Her jazz-and-classical-inspired avant-garde music combines elements of improvisation and composition.
Peter Margasak is a music critic, journalist, and artistic director of the annual Frequency Festival in Chicago, an event that grew out of his longstanding work programming the weekly Frequency Series for experimental, improvised, and contemporary classical music. Margasak wrote for the Chicago Reader for 25 years.
Damon Smith is an American free improvising bassist. He has worked with Cecil Taylor, Peter Brötzmann, Marshall Allen, John Tchicai, Elliott Sharp, Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Jim O'Rourke etc.