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free jazz

Antoine Chessex

Antoine Chessex is a Swiss saxophone player, improviser, composer and musician born in 1980 in Vevey, Switzerland. His works are based on the exploration of the physicality of sounds and spaces. Nowadays Chessex plays mostly as a solo performer appearing either in fully acoustic settings where his circular breathing textures react with the sonic architecture of the space he is performing in or amplifying his horn with amps or PA systems and electronic devices often resulting in intense live actions.

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Sonny Simmons

Huey "Sonny" Simmons (b. August 4, 1933, Sicily Island, Louisiana) is an American jazz musician.
He grew up in Oakland, California, where he began playing the english horn. At age 16 he took up the alto saxophone, which became his primary instrument. He is one of the few jazz musicians to use the english horn as a solo instrument.
In the early 1960s he worked with Charles Mingus and Prince Lasha before recording his own LPs for ESP-Disk.

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Spartak

Improvising duo from Canberra, Australia featuring Shoeb Ahmad and Evan Dorrian. Their sound is rooted in free jazz and micro-sound as well as bands like Fugazi and The Ex, utilising loops and processed melodies to build their songforms from. On any given night, they can work their pieces into ambient passages or post-punk riots. They have toured Australia, Malaysia and Singapore, playing shows with the likes of Adrian Klumpes, My Disco, Cleptoclectics, Akta Angkasa and many others.

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Land Of Kush

Land Of Kush is a large orchestra assembled and directed by Montreal composer and musician Sam Shalabi, one of the city’s most unique and prolific players over the past decade. Shalabi performs constantly on electric guitar and oud, with regular appearances in numerous jazz and free improv ensembles, membership in a kaleidoscope of avant rock bands, and at the compositional helm of various musical assemblages large and small.

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Arrington De Dionyso

Arrington de Dionyso (b. January 4th, 1975) of Olympia, Washington uses performance as a vehicle for driving through the nameless territories held between surrealist automatism, shamanic seance, and the folk imagery of rock and roll. After living in Chicago, Arkansas, and Spokane, Arrington moved to Olympia in 1992 to attend the Evergreen State College, where he studied Ethnomusicology, Music Therapy, and Butoh dance theater.

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Bill Frisell

Bill Frisell was born in Baltimore, but was raised in Denver, CO. Once a classical clarinetist, he established a firm base in his traditional harmonic knowledge early on in life. Throughout high school and college he also played guitar in various rock and R&B groups in the Denver area. During high school, however, he became profoundly interested in jazz guitar. In 1971 Frisell attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, and also began studying with Jim Hall, one of the prominent jazz guitarists of the 1960s.

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Evan Parker

Evan Parker (born 5 April 1944 in Bristol) is a British free-improvising saxophone player. His original inspiration was Paul Desmond, and in recent years the influence of cool jazz saxophone players has again become apparent in his music — there are tributes to Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz on Time Will Tell (ECM, 1993) and Chicago Solo (Okkadisk, 1997). However, Parker is probably better known for his 1960s work, which rapidly assimilated the American avantgarde — John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler and others — and forged his own, instantly identifiable style.

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