Jack Wright’s Roughhousing plus Aaron Zarzutzki

Roughhousing is the right word for what this group does. Some might think this is pure dissonance, until you realize it’s all synchronized close listening to each other from so many hours of playing together. Strange as it might seem, the part of the country most responsive to this music is the midwest and southeast, where audiences have been coming out for it. Not in droves, but enough to make us happy.

Here’s from a show in Nashville, Nov. 2015

These three have all been residents of the Spring Garden Music House in Philadelphia, Zach presently. Jack and Evan have been playing for over ten years, most recently in Wrest, with percussionist Ben Bennett. Zach and Jack started playing in the June of 2014, an intense engagement since then, the most regular musical activity for both of them, releasing Meet and Greet on the Spring Garden Music label. Their Nov. 2015 tour took them through the midwest and southeast.

Their full performance in Johnson City TN in Sept. 2016 has been released on a CD “You Haven’t Heard This” together with Jack Wright solos and available free with orders for Wright’s new book, The Free Musics

Described 25 years ago as an “undergrounder by design,”

Jack Wright is a veteran saxophone improviser based mainly in Philadelphia. Since the early 80s he has been touring through the US and Europe, finding interesting partners and playing situations. Now at 73 he is still the “Johnny Appleseed of Free Improvisation,” as guitarist Davey Williams called him back in the 80s. He continues to inspire players outside music-school careerdom, playing sessions with visiting and resident players old and new. His preferred partners over the years have been mostly unknown to the music press, and too numerous to list here. He’s said to have the widest vocabulary of any, an expert at leaping pitches, punchy, precise timing, sharp and intrusive multiphonics, surprising gaps of silence, and obscene animalistic sounds. (Someone heard a recording and asked if it was a baby elephant.) A reviewer for the Washington Post said, “In the rarefied, underground world of experimental free improvisation, saxophonist Jack Wright is king.” Wright has written a book released in Jan. 2017, The Free Musics. For more info, discography and sounds go towww.springgardenmusic.com and for other writing try this: http://jackiswright.wordpress.com/

Zachary Darrup is an improvising guitarist currently living in Philadelphia. During his early teenage years in the rural coal region of Pennsylvania a strange boy appeared like an angel, carrying a large cd booklet of wild musics of all sorts. This chance meeting at a pizza shop, plus tumultuous relationships with his home turf, school teachers, and other agents of law and rule enforcement led Zach to drop out and skip town, devoting himself to following music wherever it would take him–somewhere else. His techniques are informed by the musical possibilities of film language, jovial mockery and mimicry of plants, animals, and audience members, thoughtful room listening, word play, colors, and culinary experiments.

Evan Lipson (b. 1981) has operated as a musician since adolescence—intuitively seeking the liminal zones in which intellect and instinct, history and myth, and creative and destructive force intersect. Drawn towards aberrant perspectives at an early age, his formative experiences were primarily rooted in extreme and often discordant forms of rock, free improvisation, modernist composition, jazz, outsider pop, soundtracks, noise, and electronic music. Lipson has written music for several films, as well as a new collaboration with Duplex Planet-creator David Greenberger and Bob Stagner of the Shaking Ray Levis. Lipson also may or may not have some degree of involvement or association with an organization known as Meinschaft. Past units include Normal Love, Satanized, Dynamite Club, Femme Tops, Psychotic Quartet, and the Weasel Walter Trio. Lipson has performed throughout North America, as well as Brazil, Taiwan and Japan. His music has been released on several imprints including SKiN GRAFT, UgEXPLODE, High Two, Public Eyesore, Badmaster, Caminante, New Atlantis and Damage Rituals. Lipson is currently scheming to actualize an all-in-one dystopian tiki lounge, mystical grotto, and occult ritual chamber. He has concocted over 70 original faux-tropical cocktails since 2013.