$12 ADVANCE // $15 DAY OF SHOW
6PM DOORS // 8PM SHOWTIME
What’s that Sound? is the first edition of a Twin Cities music series co-curated by Ivan and Chris Cunningham. It is a multi-generational, multi-genre musical feast provided by some of our community’s most fearless, accomplished, and non-traditional improvisers, composers, and musicians. Icehouse has been the most progressive and important area music venue for many years— and players, listeners, eaters, and revelers all know why. Come listen.
1st Set:
KAVY KAVIRAJ & OMAR ABDULKARIM & TED OLSEN & L.A. BUCKNER
Omar Abdulkharim: trumpet
Kavy Kaviraj: piano and keyboards
L.A. Buckner: drums
Ted Olsen: bass
2nd Set:
DAMEUN STRANGE: electronics and projections
CHRIS & IVAN CUNNINGHAM are our Monday Night Jazz Residents and Guest Curators for the month of November!
Over a career stretching all the way from the Pleistocene era, Chris Cunningham has collaborated on stages and in studios with Marianne Faithfull, The Contortions, John Lurie, Jeff Buckley, Haiti’s Boukman Eksperyans, Turkey’s Omar Farouk, Ireland’s Katell Keineg and Gavin Friday, Anton Fier, John Zorn, Marshall Crenshaw, Joan Osborne, John Medeski, Richie Havens, and many others. He has released two critically acclaimed solo albums, and his Twin Cities groups include Superbus Maximus (currently), Fall of the House of Usher, Mississippi Peace, Coloring Time, Improvestra, Improvised Explosive Device, to name just a few. His main repository of recorded musical content is at fothou.com, and he dutifully serves the people as a professor and confessor of Sound Arts at Minneapolis College.
Ivan Cunningham is Minneapolis based composer, performer, and band-leader. Ivan performs with Mr Zipp, Freaque, the Charlie Lincoln Quartet, and Superbus Maximus. Ivan leads the Ivan Cunningham Quintet, and will soon be releasing and album of his own compositions featuring musicians from many different corners of the Twin Cities music scene. You may find him in a corner himself, sulking, waiting for something to happen. Usually nothing does, but he waits anyway. Time is running out, however.
Kavyesh Kaviraj is a pianist, composer and arranger from India. Although primarily a jazz pianist, he is known for his versatility as a musician; thanks to his experience in different musical climates he is closely involved with settings of many different genres and styles. Kavy is a member of the jazz quintet Mississippi, set to release their second album in 2022. He has performed with national and international artists from many different genres, including Roosevelt Collier, Jay Young and the Lyric Factory, Yolande Bruce, Debbie Duncan, Bruce Henry, Nooky Jones, Kevin Washington Quintet, Jamecia Bennett, I Self Devine, Lady Midnight, Desdamona, Toki Wright and several others.
Kavyesh is also a passionate music educator, with experience as a private instructor and experience as an educator in music academies and public schools alike, and enjoys leading jazz workshops and teaching music classes for children and youth. His compositions and arrangements for various ensembles and configurations have been featured on radio, TV and collaborative exhibitions.
Dameun Maurice Strange is a sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer whose conceptual chamber works, electronic works and operas are focused on stories of the African diaspora, often exploring Afrofuturism themes. Strange is compelled to express through sound, music, and poetry the beauty and resilience of the Black experience, digging into a pantheon of ancestors to tell stories of a triumph while connecting the past, present, and future. While his sound experiments have many dimensions, he uses West African polyrhythms, synthesizers, and other electronic tools, contemporary jazz harmonic explorations, and founding sounds and historic recordings to create modern afro-futurist performances that disrupt the notion of genre.
Strange was raised in Washington, D.C., and got his start with music at age five as a member of the DC Youth Orchestra program, an interest that continued to be cultivated at Metropolitan AME Church where he was a featured saxophone soloist throughout his high school years. Strange currently lives in Saint Paul, MN, where he has been a featured lecturer and panelist on art in the community, Afrofuturism, and art in the 21st Century at Macalester College, the University of MN, Penumbra, and other Twin Cities institutions.
Strange is an award-winning composer, Aspen Ideas Festival Scholar, and a featured composer with Alternative Motion Project for six years. The Cedar Cultural Center, International renowned artist Seitu Jones via the McKnight Foundation, Ananya Dance Theatre, is among his most recent commissioners. In 2017, Strange premiered his first full-length opera, Mother King, inspired by the life and death of Alberta Williams King with his upstart opera collective, OperaRising 52. He has also been a featured writing contributor with Pollen Midwest and Nourrir Magazine. Aside from his creative pursuits, Strange is an arts advocate with anti-racism as a foundation and a creative consultant to leaders and organizations in the for-profit, nonprofit and public sectors. Dameun was most recently the Director of Community and Belonging for the American Composers Forum.
Strange graduated from Macalester College with a Bachelor’s of Art in music, focusing on African drumming and composition and English (poetry writing). He has worked with such artists as J. Otis Powell, Ananya Chatterjea, Sage Francis, Sha Cage, and Leslie Parker. He has been a featured performer in concerts celebrating the work of Thurston Moore, George Lewis, and Henry Threadgill. Dameun is a 2018 recipient of the American Composers Forum Create Grant and the 2019 Jerome Hill Fellowship