Cross Modulations Series: Gleaming Shard | Shead – Smith – Stein Trio

Gleaming Shard is the duo of Da Wei Wang and Jerome Bryerton long time collaborators in the group Street Tentacle with Jeff Chan.

Da Wei Wang is a veteran guitar hawk of the Chicago avant-rock scene. He is best known for his work in the legendary industrial-gospel-punk band, Ono. He is also an improviser in Street Tentacle. He has toured throughout the United States and internationally to disseminate the hymns of experimental guitar music.

Da Wei’s fractured, atonal guitar style spans from dada funk to existential doom to ambient raga. He applies extended techniques and tools on his guitar to conjure dense, textured landscapes. His solo guitar work is like a storm cloud whose gaseous firmament is carpeted with hoary sprouts and dust geysers.

Jerome Bryerton’s artistic expression evolved from years of playing drums in rock, jazz and experimental groups. Performing solo or collaboratively, he’s toured and recorded internationally with many notable improvisers. Jerome is also part owner of a large industrial silk screening operation in Chicago.

While some may perceive a factory to be the antithesis to the creative process, Jerome’s imagination has been known to incorporate the errors of assembly line production into some of his art. Rejected test prints often made their way into many of his early canvases.

Strictly working within the medium of oil on canvas and applied with plexiglass. Jerome’s dense, moody abstractions and marbleized colors have been said to evoke controlled chaos, blurred memory and decay. His influences range from Masters such as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Luc Tuymans and Cy Twombly. Self-taught and skilled in improvisation, Jerome believes that everything starts with curiosity: if you’re curious about something and you’re willing to learn more about it, everything happens by itself.

Shead – Smith – Stein Trio is a trio consisting of Adam Shead on percussion, Damon Smith on Bass, and Jason Stein on Bass Clarinet.

Adam Shead is an American multi-disciplinary artist of Armenian descent living in Chicago, Il whose practice spans the realms of music, painting, photography, and poetry. Throughout his work Shead hopes to create a sense of spatial presence in which the codification of experience is dismantled in the search of personal truth. Through this pursuit of truth Adam hopes to provide a reprieve while simultaneously challenging himself and his audience through active participation in invention, compassion, trust, and grace.

Shead can be heard performing regularly throughout Chicago at such venues as Constellation, Hungry Brain, Elastic Arts, and Experimental Sound Studio; performing alongside such muscians as Jason Stein, Damon Smith, Josh Berman, Steve Swell, John Dikeman, Jasper Stadhouers, Angel Bat Dawid, Matt Piet, James Falzone, and Mary Oliver. Adam has recorded music for Amalgam Records, Ears & Eyes Records, Scripts Records, and Impermanent Records. In 2016 he was selected as Artist in Residence for the Birdsell Project’s summer season. Adam has performed at renowned festivals such as Edge Fest, DOEK festival, and Homebody Festival. Shead holds a Bachelors of Music in Percussion Performance from Columbia College Chicago as well as Masters of Music in Contemporary Improvisation and a Graduate Certificate in World Performance Studies from the University of Michigan.

Damon Smith studied double bass with Lisle Ellis and has had lessons with Bertram Turezky, Joëlle Leandré, John Lindberg, Mark Dresser and others. Damon’s explorations into the sonic palette of the double bass have resulted in a personal, flexible improvisational language based in the American jazz avant-garde movement and European non-idiomatic free improvisation. Visual art, film and dance heavily influence his music, as evidenced by his CAMH performance of Ben Patterson’s Variations for Double Bass, collaborations with director Werner Herzog on soundtracks for Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, and an early performance with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Damon has collaborated with a wide range of musicians, including: Cecil Taylor, Marshall Allen (of Sun Ra’s Arkestra), Henry Kaiser, Keith Rowe, Jaap Blonk,Roscoe Mitchell, Weasel Walter, Michael Pisaro, Wadada Leo Smith, Weasel Walter, Marco Eneidi, Wolfgang Fuchs, Peter Brötzmann and Peter Kowald. After many years in the San Francisco Bay Area, and six great years in Houston, Texas working regularly with Alvin Fielder, Sandy Ewen, Thomas Helton, David Dove & Chris Cogburn. Damon moved to the Boston area in the fall of 2016 and began working with Jeb Bishop, Pandelis Karayorgis, Joe McPhee and Ra-Kalam Bob Moses and many others. Damon has run Balance Point Acoustics record label since 2001, releasing music focusing on transatlantic collaborations between US and European musicians.

Jason Stein is among the mere handful of improvisers who play the bass clarinet exclusively. Stein leads the acclaimed trio Locksmith Isidore as well as his own quartet. He contributes to several of the leading bands on Chicago’s new-music scene and has brought a vital voice to the freest of free-jazz jams. Stein’s playing showcases an extraordinary expertise on the bass clarinet, which ranges from powerful post-bop lines to ear-grabbing wails in the altissimo range. Chicago writer Neil Tesser notes that “Stein’s playing has a rawboned swagger particular to Chicago jazz in all its manifestations – from the trad playing of Bud Freeman and Jimmy McPartland in the 20s, through the tenor titans of the 50s, through the adventurers who formed the AACM in the 60s, and right up to the city’s renowned modern cadre of new-music improvisers.” Stein moved to Chicago in 2005 and has since recorded for such labels as Leo, Delmark, Not Two, Atavistic, 482 Music, Clean Feed, Astral Spirits, and Northern Spy. Stein has performed throughout the US and Europe as both a bandleader and sideman and has amassed a discography of over 40 albums.