Damon Smith / JayVe Montgomery (solo sets)

Damon Smith

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, 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, 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.

JayVe Montgomery

Post-jazz avant-gardist JayVe Montgomery (Abstract Black) creates sounds in ways that honor the concept of looped, circular music. As a multi-instrumentalist, saxophone and electronics remain his primary sound tools.

Montgomery recorded most of his recent release, Circles With Self, outdoors at various Nashville city parks, a practice he says derives from his time working for the Chicago Park District. During his decade-long residency in Chicago, Montgomery ran a mobile recording studio that captured the work of adults with disabilities and local children who wanted to learn how to create beats and lyrics from the ground up.

Montgomery came into his own as an improvising musician in Chicago before moving to Nashville in late 2013. After taking what he describes as a self-designed course in Japanese studies and anthropology, he began playing in Chicago’s avant-garde music scene. In Chicago he worked as a street performer and helped manage Brown Rice, a performance art space located in the city’s Albany Park neighborhood.

Discussing his interest in electronics and loop-sampling, Montgomery says: “Playing with loops — this technology really helps solidify the circle (of music). The program I ran, it was really philosophical to me. You ask them, ‘where does a circle start?’ You know, right where it stops — wherever you want it to. They start and stop at the same place, you know.” For Montgomery, an admirably unfettered musician who seems determined to seize the moment, jazz is a constant presence, but he says it might be merely a point of departure. As he states, “it’s taking this concept of great black music, Sun Ra-influenced stuff, and putting it into the circles.”

Montgomery received a double BA in Japanese Studies and Anthropology from Centre College of KY and has also studied sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since moving to Nashville, he has become an integral member of the improvised and experimental music scene of the city and region; gained local recognition from Nashville Scene’s solo performance of the year 2019; and became an alum of Pitchfork Music Festival (Standing on the Corner), High Zero Festival of Improvised and Experimental Music, and True/False Film and Music Festival.

Introduction and reading by Brett Underwood

Brett Lars Underwood has been published by The Bicycle Review, 52ndcity, Bad Jacket, Bad Shoe, U City Review and included in Flood Stage: An Anthology of Saint Louis Poets, both Gasconade Reviews; 39 Feet and Rising, Missouri is a Ghost-Shaped Thing and After the Flood (Spartan Press, 2019). His verse can also be found in his chapbook Sunlit Insult and It’s Bush Lent Subtle Hints.

MUSH from Spartan Press hit the streets in February, 2018. His work has been heard at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts’ “Sound Waves” series and is part of Laumeier Sculpture Park’s “Site/Sound” exhibit.

His latest book of verse, MUSHARONA (Kung Fu Treachery Press) hit the streets late in 2020.