with T.J. Borden / Steve Baczkowski / Dan Bassin

Jack Wright (saxophones)
Evan Lipson (contrabass)
&
T.J. Borden(cello) Dan Bassin (trumpet) Steve Baczkowski (saxophones)

This duo has been smouldering over the years and finally caught fire in Jan. 2012. All have been occupants of the Spring Garden Music House in Philadelphia, Evan for several years in the 2000's, and after all Jack bought the place in the 70s, has lived there, and goes there regularly to play sessions and sweep the porch. Jack and Evan kept up their playing even after Evan moved to his current cushy location in Brooklyn. They toured in the Northeast in May and will do a ten-day tour in the Midwest in September. Their way of doing a tour is to play as a duo but also to join with various improvisers as they go, such as poet Michael Peters in Albany, guitar/electronicist Chris Cooper in Northampton, guitarist Kevin Frenette in Lowell and Boston, object manipulator id m theftible in Newburyport MA, and bassist Kit Demos in Portland. The tour concluded with performances the next week in Philadelphia, with guitarist Alban Bailly, and in Baltimore. What direction they follow depends on who they play with, what songs listeners request ("please, no requests"), and whatever they talk about in the car that day or the proverbial breakfast meal.

Jack Wright was a soprano choir boy and a marching band saxophonist in the fifties, a bluegrass washtub bassist in the early sixties, a university lecturer in history, and a revolutionist in the late sixties and seventies. Since then he has been playing freely improvised saxophone, touring the US and Europe, and has been dubbed "the Johnny Appleseed of Improvised Music". He is accused of impersonating pigs, ducks and human blowhards, but lately has been remembering the proper use of the saxophone — to support the tottering universe. His roots are in Philly, where he owns a house for wayward improvisers (Johan Nystrom is one of them and Evan used to be). Jack plays with everyone but performs and tours only with the finest, which usually means the most obscure, from Europe and the US. He and his partners are among the few true believers in absolutely free, unrestrained, unstructured, unselfconscious improvisation, played at soberingly high levels of musicianship. www.springgardenmusic.com

Evan Lipson has been active as a bassist, composer, and improviser since adolescence, now living in Brooklyn. From Philly (like a great portion of the best musicians). In an on-going pursuit of all things occult and aberrant, Lipson acquired an early interest in the latral realms of visionary & experimental music — quickly seeking to transcend the existent paradigms of idiomatic expression. This particular 'left-hand path' has afforded him the opportunity to work in a wide variety of contexts and styles (esoteric and otherwise); his formative experiences being primarily rooted in modernist composition, underground rock, jazz, outsider pop, noise, as well as various modes of improvisation.