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Mixed Media by Nick Sprysenski All art is for sale. Please inquire
Amanda Baisinger has cultivated a distinct style that is based in jazz, folk and pop. She has collaborated with people such as the formidable pianist, producer and arranger Vadim Neselovskyi, who is currently the pianist for Grammy Award winning Vibraphonist Gary Burton. Since graduating from Berklee College of Music, Amanda has been performing and teaching music in New England and New York. Most recently she has recorded an album of original music with an all-star cast of young emerging jazz musicians in New York. This concert will feature music from her new recording as well as other material. Cover $10 www.beccastevens.com , www.amandabaisinger.com
Amy Lemmon is the author of the poetry collections Fine Motor (Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Press, 2008) and Saint Nobody (Red Hen Press, 2009). Her poems and essays have appeared in Rolling Stone, Verse, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Barrow Street, Cincinnati Review, and other magazines. Selections from ABBA: The Poems, a sequence written in collaboration with Denise Duhamel, appear in several literary magazines and online at Lafovea.org.
LouAnn Shepard Muhm is a poet and teacher from Park Rapids, Minnesota. Her poems have appeared in Dust & Fire, The Talking Stick, North Coast Review, Alba, Red River Review, Eclectica, Poems Niederngasse, Creekwalker and CALYX, and she is a recipient of the 2006 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant in Poetry and an Individual Artist Grant from Region 2 Arts Council (2007). Her chapbook, Dear Immovable, was published in 2006 by Pudding House Press, and her full-length poetry collection, Breaking the Glass, is forthcoming in 2008 from Loonfeather Press. Cover $7 (includes one house drink) http://www.rosemarystarace.com
Suzanne’s approach to scat singing reveals a deep awareness of the origin and development of the jazz instrumentalist. Jazz Improv says "her scatting alone is so good that had she been the forerunner and not Ella Fitzgerald, Suzanne would have become the Ella." And All About Jazz says “Pittson is like an additional horn in the ensemble. Her ‘scatting’ drives the rhythm section and they respond to her urgings.”
Suzanne Pittson has performed at many of the country's foremost jazz venues including Birdland and Sweet Rhythm in New York, Yoshi’s in Oakland, CA, and The Jazz Bakery and Catalina’s in Los Angeles, CA. She has performed/recorded with such musicians as Mike Clark, John Patitucci, Dave Liebman, Steve Wilson, Mark Soskin, Harvie S, Jack Walrath and Jeff Pittson. Cover $10 www.suzannepittson.com
Originally from Toronto, Canada, Yoon has been in the New York City jazz scene since 2000. More than merely the sum product of a degree in classical piano, theory and composition, another in vocal jazz performance, and a lifetime listening to pop and rock, in her music Yoon has created a sound unclassifiable and fresh, and yet solidly rooted in a jazz improvising tradition. Yoon has worked with notable musicians such as Mark Dresser, D.D. Jackson, Mat Maneri, Ben Monder, Kenny Werner and Kenny Wheeler.
Kyoko Kitamura has developed a highly personal style of vocal improvisation which includes multi-lingual spoken words, electronics, as well as hints of different types of music she has heard in various countries. She quickly found work as a side-person vocalist, and honed her craft by performing and/or recording with bassist Reggie Workman, saxophonist Steve Coleman, Argentinean composer Laura Andel, vocalist Jay Clayton, and pianist Art Lande, among others. Her style has been described as "outrageous", "forward-looking", "fu*%ed up!", "nightmarish", "one of downtown's finest singers." Most recently, she performed in Antwerp's deSingel Theater and in Amsterdam's Bimhuis with cornet player Taylor Ho Bynum's ensemble. In New York City, she frequently appears in downtown venues such as Roulette, the Downtown Music Gallery, the 55 Bar and the Stone. She co-leads the group ok|ok with Mike McGinnis on woodwind, and Khabu Doug Young on ukulele and guitar. ok|ok has a CD coming out in September 2008 from RKM Music.
Born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, from immigrant parents of East Timor and Taiwan, Jen Shyu is a musician, dancer, composer, and band leader living in New York City. She also records and tours with saxophonist Steve Coleman and Five Elements (www.m-base.com), since appearing on his latest albums Lucidarium (Label Bleu 2005) and Weaving Symbolics (Label Bleu 2006). Having studied dance from age 6, piano from age 7, and violin from age 8, she performed as piano soloist at age 13 the Finale of Tchaikovskys Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Peoria Symphony Orchestra and placed 6th at age 9 at the Stravinsky International Piano Competition. Jen studied opera at Stanford University (B.A. 2000), Oxford University in England, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, and the Lake Placid Institute in New York. During her three years living in the Bay Area, Jen worked extensively with Asian Improv and Bay Area artists such as Francis Wong and Jon Jang. During this time, she also produced her debut album For Now (4am Music). Since 2001, Jen has traveled to Taiwan twice to research Taiwanese folk and aboriginal music, to Cuba both to study Afro-Cuban music and dance and to investigate the history of the Chinese-Cubans, and to Brazil to study dance with Rosangela Silvestre and Vera Passos. While cultivating her Jade Tongue Project, Jen has worked with actress/performance artist Soomi Kim, the late great poet Sekou Sundiata, and dancer Lenora Lee. www.jenshyu.com Cover $10 www.fayvictor.com , www.yoonsunchoi.com
STREAMING LINK: www.kyokokitamura.com
Arrive before 6 pm to sign up.
Our features for this session of the world's best open mic are Sharon Lynn Griffith & Linda Lerner. Cover $7 (includes one house drink)
They will be performing original material, arrangements of other people's originals, and spontaneous originals. Cover $10 www.gretchenparlato.com , www.juliehardy.com
Julia Lisella is the author of Terrain (WordTech Editions, 2007) and Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004), a chapbook. She has taught literature and writing at Tufts, MIT, Harvard, and now at Regis College where she is Assistant Professor of American Literature. A scholar of American modernism, she has written pieces on Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard and others. She grew up in Queens, New York, attended Barnard for her BA and NYU for her MA in creative writing and her PhD from Tufts University. While attending grad school, Julia made her living freelancing for the Village Voice, Fodor's Travel Guides and other publications. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Crab Orchard Review, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, Paterson Literary Review, Many Mountains Moving, and Solo and online at Literary Mama, Pebble Lake Review, The Pedestal, and Mystic River Review. Her poems have been anthologized, most recently in the Wompo (that's Women Poets) listserv's new collection soon out from Red Hen Press, Letters to the World. She has received residencies from the Millay, Dorset and MacDowell Colonies for the arts and has held several grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Rosemary Starace was born Michela Sullivan in New York City and grew up in Asotria and Brant Lake, NY. She has been teacher of art, curator, publisher, and community organizer for art and other civic issues, as well as artist and writer. She completed her M.A. in “The Creative Process in the Arts,” from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. In the early 1990s she turned her own artistic focus from painting and drawing to writing, especially poetry. Most recently, she co-edited, with Moira Richards and Lesley Wheeler, the newly published Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-po Listserv (Red Hen Press, 2008). The book is the first anthology of its kind--a feminist collaboration born from The Discussion of Women's Poetry Listserv, a vibrant, inclusive electronic community founded in 1997 by poet and scholar Annie Finch. This book presents "perhaps the most complete cross section currently available of women writing poetry in English today." (From the preface by Finch). Cover $7 (includes one house drink) http://www.julialisella.com
STREAMING LINK: www.myspace.com/heatherandthebarbarians
Cover is given where known Many spoken words events are free There is always a one-drink minimum per set; times are door opening times
August 02-August 09, 2008 
