Fire Over Heaven January 17!

LUKE STEWART
Luke Stewart is a DC/NY-based musician and organizer of important musical presentations, with a consistent presence in the national and international professional music community. He was profiled in the Washington Post in early 2017 as “holding down the jazz scene,” selected as “Best Musical Omnivore” in the Washington City Paper’s 2017 “Best of DC,” chosen as “Jazz Artist of the Year” for 2017 in the District Now, and in the 2014 People Issue of the Washington City Paper as a “Jazz Revolutionary,” citing his multi-faceted cultural activities throughout DC. In DC his regular ensembles include experimental jazz trio Heart of the Ghost, Low Ways Quartet, and experimental rock duo Blacks’ Myths.  As a solo artist, his recent interests are in compiling a series of improvisational sound structures for Upright Bass and Amplifier, utilizing the resonant qualities of the instrument to explore real-time harmonic and melodic possibilities. He has performed at many of Washington’s high-profile venues including the Kennedy Center, the Atlas Performing Arts Center, Smithsonian Portrait Gallery, 9:30 Club, Black Cat, and many others throughout DC’s storied DIY community. Luke is also a presence in the greater community of Creative Musicians, with regular multi-city ensembles including Ancestral Duo, Irreversible Entanglements featuring Moor Mother, James Brandon Lewis Trio, Heroes are Gang Leaders, and has performed in a myriad of other notable collaborations. He has been a featured artist at the Vision Festival, Ende Tymes Festival, Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music, High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music, Fields Festival, Philadelphia Free Form Festival, Forward Festival, Furious Flower Poetry Festival, and has toured abroad at the Rewire Festival, Le Guess Who? Festival, Son D’Iver Festival, and North Sea Jazz Festival, to name a few. As a scholar/performer, he has performed and lectured at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Medgar Evers College, George Mason University, Wayne State University, University of Montana, New Mexico State University, and the University of South Carolina.

photo by Jake Meginsky

Thymme Jones is a multi-instrumentalist/singer/songwriter who has been a staple of Chicago’s vibrant underground music scene for three decades. His always-active musical life first “went public” in the summer of ’82 via avant-rock/faux-jazz ensemble, Dot Dot Dot. He is best known for being the founding member of the seminal art-rock band, CHEER-ACCIDENT, who insist on being as thought-provoking and genre-defying as they were at their inception in the early ’80s. Thymme is equally at home in both experimental and pop contexts, as he has performed live and/or recorded with Tony Conrad, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Will Oldham, Bobby Conn, Jim O’ Rourke, U.S. Maple, Smog, and many others. He has been a member of Brise-Glace, Illusion Of Safety, You Fantastic!, Yona-Kit, and has recently been spotted playing a key role in Dead Rider (Todd Rittmann’s brilliant vehicle for warped rock and R&B eccentricity). When Thymme performs solo, he calls upon his extensive catalog of introspective (and often melancholy) piano/voice songs, which recalls the world of Robert Wyatt, Burt Bacharach, and Todd Rundgren.

Sandy Gordon is a drummer/percussionist, improviser, and teaching artist collaborating on projects in sound, movement, film, theater, education, healing arts, and other modalities. An Alexander Technique teacher-in-training at Balance Arts Center NYC, she teaches drums and mindfulness-in-music to all ages, and in 2017 began adapting the teachings of Pauline Oliveros and Milford Graves for children and teens at summer camps, and as a guest teacher in school band rooms. As an improviser blending percussion, objects, field recordings, and electronics, she has played most recently with Anastasia Clarke, Barry Weisblat, Marcia Bassett, Colin Fisher, and Derek Baron. She has contributed vibraphone and drums to recent albums by Ka Baird, Will Stratton, and Carlos Hernandez (Ava Luna), and designed sound for Claire Moodey’s play Femme Pathos. Sandy is a member of the collective group Causings, which has featured Thymme as a live and “call-in” guest. By coincidence, her childhood drum kit came from Thymme’s hometown in Palatine, IL, from a drum shop that sits on the former blueprint of the Hallmark store where Thymme struck inspiration for the name CHEER-ACCIDENT. Sandy and Thymme have co-taught high school music. This is their first duo performance.

Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) is a Brooklyn, NY composer, musician and artist. She produces solo albums, live performances and film/art soundtracks and frequently collaborates with artists in film, music, art, dance, multi-media, activistism and poetry, such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Caroline Monnet, Michelle Latimer and Martha Colburn. She plays violin, Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, pedal steel guitar, sings through a megaphone, and makes field recordings. Ortman’s notable performances includes venues at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, MoMA P.S. 1, Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, SF MoMA, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, The Knitting Factory, CBGB’s, St. Marks Church, SITE Santa Fe, Dia Art Foundation, the Wave Farm, National Sawdust, amongst countless other established and DIY venues in the US, Canada and Western Europe. In 2008 she founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed the live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s  film “In the Land of the Head Hunters” (1914) that premiered to sold-out audiences at the opening of the Margaret Mead Film Festival at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Of recent, Ortman is the recipient of the 2017 Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Composers and Sound Artists, the 2016 Art Matters Grant, the 2016 Native Arts and Cultural Foundation Fellowship, the 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Resident and the 2014/15 Rauschenberg Residency.