Jeb Bishop – trombone, electronics
Jaap Blonk – voice, electronics
Weasel Walter – drums, percussion
Damon Smith – double bass
Lexie Mountain – solo project
Instigated by Jaap Blonk, the quartet JaJeWeDa debuted in the spring of 2019 with a series of concerts in the US Northeast.
The band features the great Dutch sound poet and improvisor Jaap Blonk, trombone virtuoso Jeb Bishop, and the versatile and powerful “rhythm section” of bassist Damon Smith and percussionist Weasel Walter.
Jaap Blonk (www.jaapblonk.com) is unique for his powerful stage presence and playful freedom in improvisation, combined with a keen grasp of structure. The frenetically prolific bandleader/composer/multi-instrumentalist Weasel Walter summons myriad timbres from a
(mostly) conventional drum kit, while also bringing a strong performative element to the proceedings. Jeb Bishop is an extraordinary improviser, composer, and simply one of the finest living trombonists, and has been a major voice in improvised music for more than 20 years. Tireless organizer, improviser, and Balance Point Acoustics label head Damon Smith expands
both the sound world of the double bass and the roles it can play in an ensemble. (See below for individual artist bios.)
The sonic result of this alchemical gamble is a wide-open, unruly field of play where anything can and will happen. The band’s performances run the gamut from delicate chamber textures to cracked-video-game burbling to all-out electronic meltdowns.
A 2019 concert by the group at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York resulted in two releases on Balance Point Acoustics: Pioneer Works vols. 1 and 2.
https://balancepointacoustics.bandcamp.com/album/pioneer-works-vol-1-bpa-19
https://balancepointacoustics.bandcamp.com/album/pioneer-works-vol-2-bpa-9
Video from the concert can be seen at https://vimeo.com/861756329.
The band had scheduled performances in Europe in 2020 that were cancelled due to the
pandemic. They resumed with a performance at Chicago’s Hungry Brain in October 2022,
and recently they did their first European tour with concerts in Slovenia, Austria, Germany and
Switzerland.
Individual biographies:
Weasel Walter (first name, last name) is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser best known for leading the seminal punk-jazz/no-wave/brutal-prog band The Flying Luttenbachers on 16 full-length releases from 1992 to present. Seamlessly uniting the intensity and abstraction of improvised music with the nihilist aesthetics and black humor of extreme rock forms, Walter’s prolific work embodies violent momentum, idiomatic unpredictability and rapid articulation. A steadfastly independent artist for over 30 years, Walter has embodied the Do-It-Yourself ethos on every possible level, self-documenting a wide array of concepts involving an international network of uncompromising artists from many diverse disciplines. Walter is committed to creating music in idioms that are least-in-vogue at any given point, in order to find artistic truth outside of trends and status quo.
During ’90s, Mr. Walter was a catalyst in the Chicago music underground, spearheading a new wave of improvised music activity with peers like Kevin Drumm, Ken Vandermark and Jim O’Rourke and playing in experimental rock bands centered around the Skin Graft record label such as the Flying Luttenbachers, Lake Of Dracula, and Bobby Conn. Relocating from Chicago to Oakland in 2003, Walter continued down these streams, performing and recording with musicians like Evan Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Marshall Allen, John Butcher, Henry Kaiser, William Winant, Sandy Ewen, Peter Evans, Damon Smith, Vinny Golia, and Mary Halvorson as well as playing with bands like XBXRX, Burmese, Lair of the Minotaur, and Erase Errata. Moving to New York in 2009, he performed with Elliott Sharp, Thurston Moore, Darius Jones, Ava Mendoza, Alex Ward, Marc Edwards, Steve Swell, Eugene Chadbourne, Zeena Parkins, Tim Dahl, Forbes Graham, Steve Beresford, Mick Barr, Jaap Blonk, and Maria Faust, in addition to co-leading the bands Cellular Chaos and Behold The Arctopus. After a decade-long hiatus, The Flying Luttenbachers reformed in 2017. Walter tours internationally as the guitar player of Lydia Lunch Retrovirus since 2012. Permanently returning to Chicago in 2021, Walter started a new lineup of The Flying Luttenbachers, continued working with Cellular Chaos and performs with free-grind clan Vomitatrix, bizarro death metallists Encenathrakh and legacy scum-punk act Drunks With Guns. He appears on more than 215 commercially released recordings.
www.weaselwalter.com
www.ugEXPLODE.com
www.theflyingluttenbachers.com
Damon Smith is a bassist, improvisor and teacher, currently residing in St. Louis. Active since the early nineties, Damon has been a part of several free improvisation scenes across the United States, including Oakland (1993-2010), Houston (2010-2016), Boston (2016-2019), and now in St. Louis (2019-present).
His bass playing contains echoes of the gritty experimentalism of the 70’s German free
improvising tradition, but with a strong American jazz impetus that propels the improvisations in a very distinct and rhythmic way.
Damon Smith studied double bass with Lisle Ellis, and 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 avantgarde 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 in Houston, Texas, 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 the Balance Point Acoustics record label since 2001, releasing music focusing on transatlantic collaborations between US and European musicians.
https://balancepointacoustics.com/
Jeb Bishop is considered one of the preeminent trombonists in contemporary jazz and improvised music. He has played in Peter Brötzmann’s Chicago Tentet, Ken Vandermark’s Territory Band and Vandermark Five, and Globe Unity Orchestra, and has led or co-led projects including the Jeb Bishop Trio and Quartet, Lucky 7s, The Engines, and Cutout.
The Chicago Sun-Times has called him “one of the best-kept secrets in American jazz,” and he has frequently been recognized in critics’ polls, including in Downbeat Magazine and the online journal El Intruso.
Originally from North Carolina, Bishop first emerged as a musician working in the fertile Chicago scene in the 1990s and 2000s. From 2012-2022, he was based first in North Carolina and later in Boston. He has recently returned to Chicago, where he continues to be active locally an internationally. He has performed throughout North America and Europe, including at festivals in Chicago, New York, Vancouver, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon, London, and many others.
His discography, numbering well over 100 entries, is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeb_Bishop_discography.
www.jebbishop.com
www.jebbishop.bandcamp.com
Jaap Blonk (born 1953 in Woerden, Netherlands) is a self-taught composer, vocalist, poet and visual artist. His unfinished studies in mathematics and musicology mainly created a penchant for activities in a Dada vein, as did several unsuccessful jobs in offices and other well-organized systems. In the early 1980s he discovered the power and flexibility of his voice, and set out on a long-term research of phonetics and the possibilities of the human voice.
At present, he has developed into a specialist in the creation and performance of sound poetry and a unique vocal improviser, supported by a powerful and uninhibited stage presence. He performs and gives workshops worldwide on a regular basis.
Over the years, with live electronics he developed a similar agility as with his voice. To this date Blonk’s music has appeared on 32 CDs with his own Kontrans label; many other recordings as well as about a dozen books with his visual work have been published in several countries.
