Sara Schoenbeck & Wayne Horvitz

Veteran improvisers Wayne Horvitz (piano, Seattle) and Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon, Brooklyn) first met as performers at the Time Flies improvisation festival in Vancouver in 2000, and they have been frequent collaborators ever since, including in the Gravitas Quartet with Ron Miles and Peggy Lee. Their duo collaborations explore the spaces where texture, melody and song meet.

Sara Schoenbeck is a bassoonist working in the worlds of classical, contemporary notated and improvised music. The Wire magazine dubs her a “bassoon pioneer” and the New York Times has called her performances “riveting, mixing textural experiments with a big, confident sound.” Her very busy schedule has found her performing in concerts and festivals around the world with such luminaries of contemporary improvised music as Anthony Braxton, Nels Cline, Taylor Ho Bynum, Wadada Leo Smith, Ingrid Laubrock and many others. Sara has also recorded for various film projects including the Matrix 2 and 3, Dahmer and Spanglish.

Wayne Horvitz is a composer, keyboardist and record producer who came to prominence in the 1980s New York Downtown scene, working with folks like John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Bobby Previte and others. Horvitz has since relocated to Seattle, where he has several ongoing groups, runs popular venue the Royal Room, and teaches composition at Cornish College of the Arts. He has composed extensively for film, television, theater and dance. “I’m an American composer, not a jazz composer,” he says. “I’ve always been in this weird gray area where jazz musicians were the only people who don’t consider me a jazz musician. Everybody else does.”

**Note that attendees will be required to remain masked during the concert and should be prepared to show proof of vaccination.*