Asian American Jazz Fest: Tatsu Aoki, Jonathan Chen, Kikù Hibino

Tatsu Aoki, Jonathan Chen, Special Guest Lou Mallozzi, and featuring Kiku Hibino - "Asian American Experimentalism and Expansion”

Asian Improv aRts Midwest Presents:

The 23rd Annual Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival 2018

November 10 and 17 at Elastic Arts

This critically acclaimed annual event is an essential cornerstone for highlighting and documenting the significant role that Asian Americans and their collaborators have in contributing to the city’s historic and vibrant musical landscape.

Come and celebrate the 23rd anniversary of the Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival (CAAJF) www.aajazz.org. The CAAJF features the finest in contemporary Asian American music. Curated by Asian Improv aRts Midwest, national and internationally acclaimed Asian American artists and their collaborators weave together their collective flair to create an improvisational experience.

“Asian American Experimentalism and Expansion”

The experience returns: extrapolating the unique concept experience created during Tatsu Aoki’s collaboration with the Jonathen Chen Orchestra. The electro-acoustic soundscape is interwoven with the distilled reality of the Asian-American existence.

Composer, improviser, and sound artist, Jonathan Chen, creates work through either conceptual foci or through experimentation with materials. His work for electronics often consist of thick layers of fluctuating sounds produced through multiple feedback systems, and at other times a more simple approach such as his installation Amplified (2010), which only involves the light amplification of a person’s voice. As a violinist and violist his improvisational work often emphasizes timbre rather than pitch, either drawing from a wide palette, or honing in on a single sound. Chen has a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York; a Master of Arts in Music Composition from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT; and a Master of Music in Violin Performance from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. His work has been published by Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press), the Deep Listening Institute, Asian Improv Records, Interval, and Striking Mechanism, among others.

Chicago-based and Japanese-born sound artist KIKÙ HIBINO has been producing cross-genre electronic music, from chamber music for media productions to digital micro sound for art installations, he has collaborated internationally with a wide variety of artists and scholars, including Kawaguchi Takao (Dumb Type), Curtis Roads, Theaster Gates , Mike Weis (Zelienople) and Norma Field.

His recent work “Radial Categories” explores the new horizon of house music by layering the multiple sounds and noise that have different rhythm structure.

The publication, The Wire once described his music as “trying to cram in as many memories as possible before it all disappears” and that the music “concerns itself with themes of capturing and preserving fleeting moments” (2007, issue 279).

He studied electronic music composition at University of California at Santa Barbara under the mentorship of Curtis Roads and Karen Tanaka, and holds M.A. in media art and technology. B.A. in policy management from Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus in 2002, where he minored electronic music composition under the mentorship of Toru Iwatake, Atau Tanaka, and Christopher Penrose.

Lou Mallozzi is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago who works in performance, installation, sound art, improvised music, and drawing. He has exhibited and performed in the US and Europe at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Renaissance Society, Ausland Berlin, Radiorevolten Festival Halle, TUBE Audio Art Series Munich, Fylkingen Stockholm, and many others. He is appears on recent CD releases by Ken Vandermark (Momentum 3: Monster Roster) and Rob Mazurek (Wrecks). He is Assistant Professor in the Sound Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tatsu Aoki is a leading advocate for the Asian American community, as well as a prolific composer and performer of traditional and experimental music forms, a filmmaker, and an educator. Born in Tokyo, 1957 into the Toyoakimoto artisan family, a traditional house for training and booking agents for geisha. Aoki was part of his family’s performance crew from the age of four. In the late 1960s, he shifted his energies from the traditional to American pop and experimental music. By the early 1970s, Aoki was active in Tokyo’s underground arts movement as a member of Gintenkai, an experimental ensemble that combined traditional music and new Western forms.

In 1977, Aoki left Tokyo and is now one of the most in-demand performers of bass, shamisen, and taiko, contributing more than ninety recording projects and touring internationally during the last thirty-five years. Aoki is the Founder and Artistic Director of Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival.