On September 22, FourOneOne presents a double bill with Luke Stewart’s Silt Remembrance Ensemble (with Daniel Carter, Jamal Moore, Chad Taylor, Brian Settles, No Land, and Janice Lowe) and isabel crespo pardo’s poem-song trio, sinonó (with Lester St. Louis and Henry Fraser). 

Silt Remembrance Ensemble draws on the membership of two groups in bassist and organizer Luke Stewart's vast constellation—veteran saxophonists/multi-instrumentalists Daniel Carter and Jamal Moore are members of Remembrance Quintet (with Stewart, Chris Williams and Tcheser Holmes), while drummer Chad Taylor and saxophonist Brian Settles are Stewart's bandmates in Silt Trio. While planning an album release concert for Remembrance Quintet's Do You Remember (2023), Stewart realized that Silt Trio would also be in town recording. He took the opportunity to weave the two threads together, combining Silt's driving, straight-ahead sound with Remembrance's searching, almost ceremonial approach, with poets No Land and Janice Lowe contributing text and vocal performances to the concert recording. As with many of Stewart's projects, the poetics of ancestral recall and in-the-moment creativity are never far away. The intergenerational group brings together collaborators from Stewart's many musical communities, DC (Settles), Chicago (Taylor), Baltimore (Moore) and New York (Carter, No Land, Lowe) and grounds itself in Stewart's lived philosophy of improvisational liberation. "Improvisation is also a reflection of how we think about art and ownership," he told Piotr Orlov in an interview for BOMB magazine. "We want to say that our ideas are ours, because we believe that ideas are limited. We don't trust ourselves to know that ideas are abundant and unlimited, which improvisation is an expression of."

Luke Stewart is a bassist and organizer whose multivalent approach manifests through jazz – of both the inside and outside varieties – as well as noise, poetry, sampling, and post-hardcore. Originally from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, Stewart found an early commitment to the bass, immersing himself in the study of its foundational roles in rock, punk, hip hop and eventually jazz. Relocating to Washington, D.C. to study audio engineering, he quickly found himself programming radio and live music shows, before landing his first "avant-music" gig as a last-minute sub in the Sun Ra Arkestra. He made a name for himself in D.C. not only as an intensely adventurous bassist, equally adept at playing in the tradition(s) or hypnotizing audiences with his solo bass feedback performances, but also as a stalwart and principled organizer, balancing leadership roles within both the non-profit jazz presenter Capitol Bop and at the DIY punk, noise, and experimental show house Rhizome. He's kept strong ties to D.C. since relocating to NYC in recent years, but the move also signaled a flourishing of ongoing projects that have increasingly connected Stewart with national and international audiences and collaborators including Irreversible Entanglements, Blacks' Myths, History Dog and David Murray.

While sinonó is the primary compositional vehicle of NYC-based Latinx vocalist isabel crespo pardo, improvisation is also very much at the center of this group. Originally from Costa Rica, teenage crespo pardo initially attended conservatory to study visual art, before music became their focus. They've kept an open spirit when it comes to mediums and disciplines, whether it's through poetry set to music, or screenprinting graphic scores onto suspended textile set pieces, or the intense monologues of their collaborative theater pieces. "I love songs," crespo pardo says, “but I also need the freedom to improvise, sculpting the music for that moment." 

crespo pardo formed sinonó in the midst of a period of personal transformation. "This collection of compositions is the first I wrote after understanding myself as non-binary," they say. "In general, they reflect a deep turning point in my life, full of overwhelmingly beautiful and devastating moments. They were difficult to write and difficult to share, but I set them up to always center openness, patience and truth. And so from performance to performance, they change as much as we do."

Cellist Lester St. Louis (of HxH) and double bassist Henry Fraser, each singular improviser-composers in their own right, are ideal co-creators in this respect. crespo pardo is unafraid to lead by giving space or by being assertive, and sinonó's improvised passages coalesce suddenly into text-grounded song forms in beautifully unexpected yet intuitive ways. The combination of voice and strings is a deep one, where the strings are able to match crespo pardo's voice in pitch flexibility. They can also contrast it in timbre and percussive effect, at different moments evoking everything from the viola and bass interplay of Leroy Jenkins and Sirone in the Revolutionary Ensemble to the shimmering harmonics of the spectralist composers or medieval music. crespo pardo's singing constantly toes the line between song and sonority, and even their more abstract vocalizations feel more like cosmic extensions of Latin American folk traditions than the "extended techniques" of any avant-garde. Their voice changes form as the moment demands, full and commanding one moment, spoken or almost a whisper the next. But rather than seeming like the channeling of different spirits or characters, these transfigurations are an earthbound reassurance that every being contains many states.