2024 Improv Spaces Music Festival - Opening Night!

About this event

FESTIVAL DATES: MAY 29-June 2

IMPROV SPACES MUSIC FESTIVAL presents five days of live music, art, and dance, showcasing a range of Saratoga County and Capital Region musicians as well as bringing musicians and artists from New York City/New Jersey upstate!

Wednesday, May 29th, 2024
OPENING NIGHT PROGRAM:

6PM: Joseph Bruchac (flute) and Steve Candlen (drum)

7-9PM: WATER. a collaborative improv.
Featuring the Rock City Falls Trio (Alex Chang, harp; Jason Handron, bass; Adam Forman, drums) and artist Michael Miyahira (aka Mike Ming)

The five days of live music and the arts will including the special opening night performances with Saratoga Springs poet laureate, storyteller, and musician Joseph Bruchac playing with multi-instrumentalist singer songwriter Steve Candlen and the local genre-blurring ensemble Rock City Falls Trio (Alex Chang, electric and acoustic harp; Jason Handron, double bass; and Adam Forman, drums) who will perform a new collaborative improvisation with the Brookyln-based visual artist Michael Miyahira (aka Mike Ming) titled: “Water. a collaborative improv” Featuring the Rock City Falls Trio (Alex Chang, harp; Jason Handron, bass, and Adam Forman, drums) and artist Michael Miyahira (aka Mike Ming)

Miyahira was a member of the New York-Tokyo artist collective The Barnstormers and is known for his large-scale drip paintings that pay homage to water and the sea. The painter’s interest in the ocean stems from his surfing practice and his lifelong proximity to the water. The improvisation will involve a large-scale action painting in conversation to the trio’s collaborative musical dialog that will feature original compositions for improvisation.

PERFORMER BIOS:

Joseph Bruchac

Writer, musician, and traditional storyteller, Joseph Bruchac is a a tribally enrolled citizen of the Nulhegan Abenaki Nation. A best-selling author of over 180 books in several genres, his poems, essays, and stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and hundreds of magazines ranging from Akwesasne Notes, Cricket, and Highlights for Children, to the Paris Review, Smithsonian, and National Geographic. 

His many honors include a New York State Council on the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the American Book Award, the Virginia Hamilton Award, the National Education Association Civil Rights Award, the National Wildlife Federation Award, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. In 2023 he was chosen as the first Poet Laureate of Saratoga Springs, NY.

As a musician, he has focussed on traditional Northeastern Native music and the ballads of the days of logging in the Adirondack region, as well as composing his own songs. For a number of years he, his sister Marge, and his two grown sons Jesse and James performed together as the Dawn Land Singers and released two CDs of original and traditional Abenaki music: ALNOBAK and HONOR SONGS/GWISINTOW8GANAL. An accomplished Native flute player and drummer, he has been featured as a musician at schools, festivals and other venues throughout the United States including the Champlain Valley Festival, Abenaki Cultural Heritage Days,  the Old Songs Festival, The Flurry, The Clearwater’s Great Hudson River Revival Festival, the Corn Island Festival, the National Storytelling Festival, The Eighth Step, the Kanatsiohareke Strawberry Festival, the Sierra Storytelling Festival, and Caffe Lena. 

Steve Candlen

Steve Candlen is a singer songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He toured with Felix Caveliere’s The Young Rascals for eight years from 1988 to 1996 and played with Columbia recording artist Franklin Micare for 20 years. Candlen also works with a range of musicians in multiple genres including free jazz and improvisation as a composer, producer, and songwriter.

Candlen is a soulful and socially conscious songwriter, engaging with contemporary issues. He is the winner of the 2005 Music For Miracles Songwriting Contest with the title “All Over The World” and was voted Metroland Magazine’s “Best Male Vocalist 2006” and “Best Drummer 2007.” He was also recently awarded an Eddie Music Award in 2022 and 2023.

He is also a member of Eddie Merit Award-winning Family Tree, a band that improvises on cover songs, in partnership with musicians Chad Ploss, Lori Friday, Kenny Hohman and Chris Carey. Family Tree has been in residency at Putnam Place in Saratoga Springs on Monday nights since July 2021. Candlen has cultivated a community of singer/songwriters at the original music-based weekly open mic titled “Songwriter Powwow with Steve Candlen” at Twisted Fiddler in Troy.

Rock City Falls Trio and artist Michael Miyahira

Alex Chang

Alex Chang is an electric and acoustic harpist and composer who lives and works between Saratoga County, NY and Newark, NJ. Her practice finds its foundations in free jazz, indie rock, Celtic and new music and her classical training. She experiments with the diversity and sweep of resonances of the electric harp — from astral tones to wailing walls of distortion. Her work explores entanglements and embodied practices through the concepts of free jazz and improvisation and the ways in which music moves through us and puts us in relation and dialogue with others. Her interest in interdisciplinary collaborative practices attends to how improvisation opens up our sentience, our emotional and empathic relations around us and beyond as intertwined beings for connection and healing. She is thrilled to have original themes being played with the Rock City Falls Trio in dialog with artist Michael Miyahira within the Opening Night performance of Water. a collaborative improv. She is also Co-Director of Improv Spaces with Adam Forman.

Adam Forman

Adam Forman is a classically trained drummer/percussionist who has performed in a wide range of musical settings. He has worked with composer/director/multi- instrumentalist Joe Fee and innovative collective IKTUS Percussion. His deep focus on improvisational practice and sensibilities allows for inventive syntheses of his experiences in experimental musical performance, including his punk and indie-rock influenced work.

He has significant performance experience including at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in Austin, Texas as a member of Talujon Percussion Quartet and with the Argento Chamber Ensemble, Fireworks Ensemble, and Greenwich Village Orchestra, as well as with the Manhattan Symphonie across China, and on large-scaled cruise ships and in
theaters throughout New York City. He was also drummer for the bi-coastal band Butterscotch Stanley for more than a decade.

Recently he’s been exploring composing and rearranging music that would inspire unique, improvised-based performances. Adam’s arrangement of free jazz master Masahiko Togashi’s Pray was performed by the Rock City Falls Trio at their recent concert titled Equilibrium: a collaborative improv in September 2023. He is also Co-Director of Improv Spaces.

Jason Handron

Double bassist and composer Jason Handron grew up in the capital region. He brings his improvisational work and practice in unconventional performance and music composition to this collaboration, having performed in the past as co-founder and member of the chamber band Drive(J:) and participated in the soundSCAPE Festival (Maccagno, Italy) and New Music Gathering (Boston, MA). Through his bowing and technique, Handron continuously harnesses and extends the sonic potentiality of his instrument, allowing a unique improvisational vocabulary to manifest.

Michael Miyahira

Michael Miyahira, aka Mike Ming, is a Brooklyn based undisciplined-improvisational-automatic-free association-abstract-visual artist/doodler. He graduated from RIT with a degree in Illustration in 1995. His current interests for creating images and objects are inspired by the sea, architecture, landscapes, people, animals, sounds, internet, magazines, films, pop culture and lines. Current choice of mediums are water based and sculptural, ranging from paints, inks, markers, pens, found objects, glue and resin. Sometimes, but most likely, not all at once. Michael Miyahira is associated with Barnstormers(NYC) and DYZ-EXP(TKYO). Two distinct groups affiliated with time lapse paintings, live paintings, murals and art shows in their Hey! Yo! days, when he could explore making art with stencils, rattle cans, painting on floors and painting on surfboards, snowboards and skateboards.

Thanks to our sponsors!

Saratoga Arts made this program possible through the Community Arts Regrant Program, funded by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

More info improvspaces.org