STEVE SWELL AND DAVE SEWELSON DUO
Opening with Detroit artists Kaleigh Wilder and Everett Reid
Friday, November 20 at 7:30 PM EST
This performance is made possible with generous support from Mike Resil
This second installment of the Edgefest 24 Virtual Concert Series features the duo of trombonist Steve Swell and baritone saxophonist Dave Sewelson. Steve is an old friend and a veteran of the festival, having appeared in many groups, and we welcome Dave to the family for the first time. Preceding them will be a set by Kaleigh Wilder and Everett Reid.
Born in Newark, NJ, Steve Swell has been an active member of the NYC music community since 1975. His breadth of versatility has allowed him to tour and record with such mainstream artists as Lionel Hampton and Buddy Rich in the past, as well as more contemporary artists like Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor and William Parker. He has over 50 CDs as a leader or co-leader and is a featured artists on more than 125 other releases. He runs workshops around the world and is a teaching artist in the NYC public school system focusing on special needs children.
Swell has worked on music transcriptions of the Bosavi tribe of New Guinea for MacArthur fellow, Steve Feld in 2000. His CD, “Suite For Players, Listeners and Other Dreamers” (CIMP) ranked number 2 in the 2004 Cadence Readers Poll. He has also received grants from USArtists International in 2006, MCAF (LMCC) awards in 2008 and 2013 and has been commissioned three times for the Interpretations Series at Merkin Hall in 2006 and at Roulette in 2012 and 2017. Steve was also awarded the 2014 Creative Curricula grant (LMCC) for the project: “Metamorphoses: Modern Mythology in Sound and Words” which was taught in a month long residency at Baruch College Campus High School in Manhattan. Steve is an inaugural recipient of a Jazz Road Tours grant (SouthArts.org) begun in 2019 and received a 2020 Creative Engagement grant (Lower Manhattan Cultural Council) for performances to take place in Manhattan.
Steve was nominated for Trombonist of the Year 2008, 2011 & 2020 by the Jazz Journalists Association, was selected Trombonist of the Year 2008-2010 , 2012 and 2014-2019 by the magazine El Intruso of Argentina and received the 2008 Jubilation Foundation Fellowship Award of the Tides Foundation. Steve has also been selected by the Downbeat Critics Poll in the Trombone category each year from 2010-2018 & 2020. His recording “Soul Travelers” with Jemeel Moondoc, Dave Burrell, William Parker and Gerald Cleaver was chosen as Album of the Year in 2016 by the New York City Jazz Record. His performance of “Kende Dreams” with Connie Crothers, Rob Brown, Larry Roland and Chad Taylor at the 2016 Vision Festival was cited as one of the best performances of the year by the same journal. Steve’s CD Music for Six Musicians: Hommage à Olivier Messiaen was listed in NPR’s top 50 albums for 2018.
Steve is presently a teaching artist through the American Composers Orchestra, Healing Arts Initiative , Mind-Builders Creative Arts Center (Bronx), the Jazz Foundation of America, Leman Manhattan Preparatory School and the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music.
Read more: steveswell.com
Dave was born in Oakland, California, in 1952. There was a half-size violin kept in the closet in case he wanted to be a concert violinist. He played trumpet at the age of nine, moving to baritone horn at the age of eleven, followed by a stint on drums until settling on electric bass at thirteen, adding upright bass to the mix until the switch to saxophone at the age of twenty-one. He has specialized in the baritone saxophone since the early seventies.
Sewelson arrived in New York City in the summer of 1977, settled in the East Village becoming a stalwart of the downtown scene, played in many bands of the area including the 25 O’Clock Band, Jemeel Moondoc’s Jus Grew Orchestra, Saheb Sarbib’s Multinational Big Band ,Noise R Us, Mofungo, Freedomland and Fast ‘n Bulbous. He was a founding member of the Microscopic Septet. Lifetime member of William Parker’s Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra. He has played with many wonderful musicians, including, Billly Bang, John Zorn, Peter Kuhn, Alex Cline, Roy Campbell, Sonny Murray, Kidd Jordan, Daniel Carter, Will Connell and Stephanie Stone. Current projects include, Two Sisters Inc., Sewelsonics, the MFAFWQ, Trio Dave, and Orchestra Dave and the Jesse Dulman Quartet.
As well as being a guest on radio shows on such stations KPOO, WFMU and WKCR he has been heard on the theme music of shows on NPR. Dave hosts a weekly radio show on Saturdays from 2 til 5pm on WFMU’s Give the Drummer Radio Stream. Every week Dave has a guest musician/poet/artist who joins him in the air for conversation, playing records and spontaneous improvisation live on the radio. Past guests have included, Daniel Carter, William Parker, Steve Swell, Michael Moss, Steve Dalachinksy Lisa Sokolov and a host of other luminaries.
Read more: sewelsonics.com
Kaleigh Wilder is an improviser and sound sculptor. Speaking through the baritone saxophone, her music is born of her embodied experiences of joy, spirituality, childhood trauma, and being biracial—not white or black, but both. This duality can too be seen in her training. She is a trained classical musician but one who also studied jazz, free improvisation, and even went so far as West Africa to study Ghanaian music and dance. It is hard to place her music into a cut and dried genre, so Kaleigh likes to play from what she knows in her body—what her hands, ears, and inner child remember. Using timbral extremes that shift between raw and polished, abrasive and sensitive, discomfort and catharsis, Kaleigh channels her lived experiences into sound to communicate viscerally. She hopes to amplify in the listener their own understanding of music and self.
Kaleigh has played with notable musicians Marion Hayden, Ingrid Jensen, Ellen Rowe, Allison Miller and performed throughout the United States, Central Europe, Costa Rica and Ghana. She holds a masters in improvisation from the University of Michigan and a bachelors in music performance from Ball State University.
Everett Reid (also known as Nova Zaii) is a drummer, electronic producer, and inventor originally from the south side of Chicago. After completing two degrees in Performing Arts Technology and Jazz Studies at the University of Michigan, he moved to the city of Detroit to connect deeper with the city’s historic electronic music scene and to engage its vibrant jazz legacy. From 2016 to the present, he’s been a core member of the electronic-jazz group, The JuJu Exchange, which released its debut album “Exchange” in 2017 that quickly rose to the number one Jazz Album streaming position on Apple Music. When not making music as Nova Zaii, or with his band The JuJu Exchange, he continuously explores new domains of music especially on local levels, with like-minded forward thinking artists in Detroit and Chicago.
