Cross Modulations Series: Dessel/Finnegan Duo | Chrysalis (Acevedo/Baker/Bitney/Jackson)

EREZ DESSEL

After graduating from the New England Conservatory in Boston in 2020, Dessel moved to Savannah, GA, where he served as music director at the Savannah Music Festival Jazz Academy, Savannah’s first free after-school youth jazz program. He also kept up an active performing career in the southeast, including presenting an hour-long improvised work for piano, pastel, and paper at the Savannah Cultural Arts Center. He moved to Chicago in 2022, and has worked continuously both as a performer and organizer, recording in an array of contexts with many internationally renowned musicians (including Ken Vandermark, Tim Daisy, Dustin Laurenzi, Maria Elena Silva, and Seajun Kwon).

His current group activity includes the bands Edition Redux, Walking Cliche Sextet, and the Thwartet, Maria Elena Silva; duos with Scott Taylor and Tyler Wagner; and work as a solo performer. Dessel created and curates the Night School series at Agitator gallery, which presents video artists and improvising musicians in a spontaneous performance context. Dessel has toured nationally and internationally, including performances in Europe and Korea, and his concerts and recordings have received critical acclaim

LILY FINNEGAN

Lily Glick Finnegan is a Chicago born and based drummer, composer, improviser, and organizer. This year she was featured in the Chicago Reader as a “Chicagoan of Note”. She is a member of Edition Redux, a new ensemble featuring Ken Vandermark, Erez Dessel, and Beth McDonald. They have upcoming plans to tour Europe in 2023, and the United States and South America in 2024. In addition, she leads her own group and is part of Thwartet and the Sarah Clausen trio. She has collaborated with artists including gabby fluke-mogul, Ken Vandermark, Shanta Nurullah, Macie Stewart, Dave Rempis, Ben Lamar Gay, Devon Gates, Ed Wilkerson, Lia Kohl, Katinka Kleijn, Fred Jackson, Jason Stein, Christof Kurzmann, and Katie Ernst.

In 2021 she completed a Masters of Music from Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. She received a full scholarship to participate in the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, a 20 person international cadre of musicians led by Danilo Perez. At Berklee she was part of the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. Here she was mentored by Terri Lyne Carrington, Kris Davis, and Linda May Han Oh. She’s worked on projects with Carrington including “Music for Abolition” as part of the Visualizing Abolition Exhibit at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her thesis project was entitled “Music and Abolition: Creating a World Without Policing- Music’s Role in Imagination, Experimentation, and Collectivity”. Prior, she earned a Bachelor of Arts double major from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in sociology and music.This fueled her interest in studying the confluence between power structures, history, and social movements with music.

She is one of the curators of the Option Series, a showcase of contemporary approaches to improvisation and composition held at Experimental Sound Studio. Lily works for the independent music cooperative Catalytic Sound as the record store manager and festival organizer. In 2023 she was nominated as one of the Next Jazz Legacy semi finalists.

AUSBERTO ACEVEDO

Ausberto Acevedo is a bassist, composer, improviser, and teacher performing regularly both live and in the studio. Ausberto has performed or recorded with a variety of musicians including, Gino Robair, Kyle Bruckmann, Jason Stein, Guillermo Gregorio, Keefe Jackson, Frank Gratkowski, Jaimie Branch, Dan Bitney, Jim Baker, Adam Shead, Jerome Bryerton, and Jeff Chan. Ausberto is a founding member of Resonance Arts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to presenting unconventional performance in unlikely spaces throughout the greater Chicago area.

JIM BAKER

Jim Baker has been playing piano and synthesizer in and around Chicago and the world for a few decades, mostly in improvisational contexts. His work has been documented on more than eighty commercially released recordings, including recent and/or forthcoming work with Extraordinary Popular Delusions (usually comprised of some combination of Baker, Mars Williams, Edward Wilkerson Jr., Brian Sandstrom, and/or Steve Hunt); Rempis/Abrams/Ra+Baker; Urs Leimgruber and Jason Roebke; Charles Rumback; Brandon Lopez and Bill Harris; WiHuBa (with Edward Wilkerson Jr. and Steve Hunt); Mars Williams; Keefe Jackson/Baker/Julian Kirshner; Luke Stewart (with Wilkerson, Vandermark, and Ra); Bernard Santacruz and Samuel Silvant; Christoph Erb (with Frank Rosaly, Michael Zerang, or Steve Hunt); Junius Paul; Benjamin Vergara/Keefe Jackson/Phil Sudderberg; Dan Phillips; Forget to Find (with Jean-Luc Guionnet, Pierre-Antoine Badaroux, and Jason Roebke); and Madness of Crowds (with Brian Sandstrom, Matt Lux, Nate Lepine, and Joe Adamik).

For a number of years in the 90s, Baker was the house pianist for the weekly Sunday evening jam sessions at the Velvet Lounge. For most of the last fifteen years, he has been playing most Mondays at Beat Kitchen with free-improvisation group Extraordinary Popular Delusions.

DAN BITNEY

Dan Bitney is an experimental musician and composer based in Chicago. He works within avant-garde electronic rock and improvisational groups most notably Tortoise, Isotope 217, Spectralina.

KEEFE JACKSON

Keefe Jackson, saxophonist/clarinetist/improvisor/composer, arrived in Chicago in 2001 from his native Fayettevile, Arkansas. He performs regularly in the U.S. and in Europe with many musicians including Pandelis Karayorgis, Tomeka Reid, Tim Daisy, Dave Rempis, Jeb Bishop, Jason Roebke, Jason Adasiewicz, Mike Reed, Jason Stein, Josh Berman, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Frank Rosaly, Oscar Jan Hoogland and Marc Unternaehrer. He has also appeared with Michael Moore, Ab Baars, Michiel Braam, Satoko Fujii, and Anthony Coleman. Bill Meyer (Chicago Reader): “…the impeccable logic of his lines and the richness of his tone leave you wanting more… Jackson’s high-register squiggles and coarsely voiced, rippling runs push the limits of the tenor’s tonal envelope.” Frank van Herk, de Volkskrant (Amsterdam): “[Jackson] has an old-fashioned, warm-woolly sound, and a feeling for melodic lines that take their time in unfolding.” He has been mentioned in the DownBeat Critics Poll in the Rising Star Tenor Saxophone category. Recordings are available on Delmark and Clean Feed Records.